In my first semester of college, all freshmen were required to attend a session called "Scots Step Up!" for orientation that was designed to teach us about sexual assault in an effort to lessen its occurrence. It was nothing like I thought it was going to be and, unfortunately, I don’t mean that in a good way. We were shown two videos: one about consent, and one that examined the events leading up to a sexual assault.
Before we could even start, an uneasy feeling set in my bones when the instructor said, "It's okay to laugh at this." The first video, called Tea Consent, was created by the Thames Valley Police in an effort to explain the binary concept of consent being as yes to tea or no to tea, in which tea is a euphemism for sex. Initially, the video begins lighthearted by stating that a person is not obligated to “drink the tea” that is made for them nor does it make sense to become angry at them for not drinking said tea. It further states that unconscious people most definitely do not want tea. In summation, don’t make somebody drink your tea if they say no.
My problem with this video is not the video itself because consent should be that simple, but the way that the video was used felt like it was an attempt to make sexual assault a less serious topic in order to discuss it -- which, quite frankly, doesn't make any sense to me.
In fact, most of the audience started laughing halfway through the short video except for a distinctly uncomfortable sect of people. For the next few days, I heard jokes about this video and it made me even more mad because to me, they had missed the point.
The second video that we were shown depicted a young woman that decided to go out to a bar to drink and was taken home by a stranger that took advantage of her. She was very drunk and there were several moments in the video where people could have stopped the stranger from taking her home but didn't. The alternate ending of the video depicts her peers intervening and all resulted in the prevention of her rape.
While this video did depict an example of sexual assault, a problem that many of my peers and I had with it was that it only depicted a very specific version of it without addressing the frightening aspect of familiarity associated with many cases of sexual assault.
It didn’t capture the uncomfortable feeling that comes with trying to tell a person no. It’s easy to tell a stranger "NO" because you don’t have to deal with any repercussions to that relationship. It’s much easier to walk away from someone you don’t know because you’ll never see them again.
When it is someone you know, there is a pressure to maintain a sense of harmony. You are so used to how you and everyone else see that person, it’s easier for them to get close to you because they seem so harmless. Then when they’ve crossed the line, it’s hard to accept that someone you trusted could have done that to you. It becomes harder for people to believe you.
Furthermore, our instructor specifically cited the woman's drunkenness at the party as an important factor that led to her rape rather than highlighting the fact that the stranger had been clearly intent on taking her home by any means necessary.
The way that we teach consent is essential to deconstructing the danger that is rape culture. Brock Turner is the face of a culture that removes blame from the perpetrator and places it on the victim by blaming the party rather than apologizing for his traumatizing violation of a person. Talking around consent diminishes the seriousness of sexual assault and rape culture, and I'm not down with that.
Properly teaching consent isn't just about preventing sexual assault, but it is about teaching respect. It shouldn't be about reminding people to see a person as someone's "sister, mother, brother, girlfriend, daughter, something or other." It should be about treating a person like a human being, because that's exactly what they are.
