Chapter Two: What is Consent and why do we need it?

EXPANDING CONSENT, PART I; Chapter Two.

May 21, 2024

I am Substacking a book! It’s called Expanding Consent: breaking cycles of domination in our homes and beyond, and it’s free to read.

You can read the Introduction here, Chapter 1 here, and find all of the chapters as I release them under BOOK: Expanding Consent.

Chapter Two

Consent: what is it, and why do we need it?

What is consent then?

Consent, in a literal sense, is agreeing to something: we consent to our picture being taken; we consent to being touched.

But consent in a deeper, more multi-dimensional sense, is agreeing freely and mutually – and that is a lot more complex, because making decisions freely and autonomously, AND in relationship with someone else or a group of people, can be hard for young people (and all people!), partly due to the environment we find ourselves in, and partly due to the degree of access we have to our sense of what we need and want.

Sophie Christophy is an activist, unschooler, and pioneer of Consent-based Education, and she defines consent as a yes, no or maybe that is “freely given, informed, and coming from a deep sense of self.”

Priscilla Alderson, who has been researching children and consent for decades, describes consent as “the sense of control and freedom as opposed to coercion and helpless fear.” She describes consent as freedom, and control, together – a sense that we know we are able to exercise autonomy from a place of awareness.

Consent is fundamentally about making free and autonomous decisions, from a sense of knowing who we are, and without the fear of repercussions of any kind.

Alderson also talks about how autonomy is practice reined in by a myriad of factors and constraints, such as cultural influences and values, and so consent in real life will more often than not be “partial and relative.” This is why I will use the terms consent-based, or centering consent, a lot more than I used consent alone. Because these two terms indicate we are doing our best to facilitate and enact relationships and agreements that are rooted in consent, with an understanding that consent, in practice, is often constrained, partial and emergent.

Creating Consent

Consent is often framed as a one-way exchange, but in their book Creating Consent Culture, Marcia Baczynski and Erica Scott describe it as a mutual agreement about how we’re going to show up in a space. “It’s not about getting consent, it’s about creating it,” they write.

Consent is not something we give or take, it’s something we build together.

They write about creating a culture of consent, which means crafting and facilitating an environment where consent in its many forms can flourish.

Both of those things matter when we centre consent in our homes: the actual practicing of consent, AND the environment we intentionally create for those agreements and decisions to take place.

All of my research and reading and practice has come to this conclusion: we need both.

• We need to invest in creating a consent culture, for consent-based interactions to be possible.

• We need to understand the why and how of consent-based interactions, in order to root our practice in consent.

But why Consent-based-ness?

Consent-based is a term coined by Sophie Christophy, who was the first person to make the link between theories of consent and the experience of education, and its importance when considering the culture and relationships of learning environments.

She sees the theory and practice of consent-based education as an all-encompassing way to live with young people, that is not limited to their ‘education’ but extends to how we live, learn and relate in all aspects of life.

Christophy has been researching consent and advocating for children since 2010, and writing, lecturing and teaching consent-based education courses since 2016. She has also co-founded two consent-based, self-directed education settings in the UK. Her work kickstarted an entire movement of people who are concerned with consent in many different ways.

When we spoke, Christophy explained that she “ended up at consent because I identified the key obstacle to children’s rights realisation as cultural, and caused by invisible embedded patriarchal, power over, dominator culture, taught and enacted on children from birth.” For Christophy, “the antidote to this is consent practices.”

Based on our conversations, and on my own research and practice, I don’t believe you can separate consent from an understanding of the role of power in relationships, and in creating fixed systems of oppression. The two are diametrically opposed.

Consent is our way out of systemic injustice.

It’s out there, quite literally.

Yesterday I saw a mother deer and her fawn walking through the little deer path that runs through an overgrown bit at the back of our garden. We see deer walk through often. We live on an island in Downeast Maine (at least part of the time), and this isn’t unusual. It’s overrun by deer.

But yesterday I was sitting on the porch, sipping my coffee and looking out at the fog enveloping the pond just beyond our back yard.

The mother deer came from the shores of the pond, presumably up a steep hill that then turns into our gently sloping garden. She walked slowly, probably aware of us but uncaring, yet cautious. Her fawn stumbled along behind her. She calmly crossed the entire back of our garden, not once looking back to check if her fawn was there. They stopped briefly, then carried on down a path at the far left of our garden, past the treehouse my husband built, back down towards the neighbouring piece of land that stretches further into the pond, tongue-like.

It occurred to me then how effortless her mothering was. Not easy, of course. But lacking a lot of the striving I see everyone around me experience, myself included. She declared herself the leader, and assumed her fawn would follow.

But here’s the thing: she didn’t MAKE the fawn follow. She didn’t tell the fawn how to tread, where to put their feet, which path to follow. She didn’t indicate they should be quiet or be any way at all. She didn’t even look back and see if her baby was following along. Not once!

She blazed her own trail, and assumed the fawn would follow in their own time. Rather than overtly leading, she was modeling.

Perhaps I’m anthropomorphising a bit here, but humour me. Consent existed in that relationship. The mother did what she did best, as a result of experience and knowledge: walked to places that were safe, used tried and tested paths, found food. The fawn did what it felt was also best for its survival: follow the mother, but in its own time, stumbling a bit, getting distracted perhaps. Nobody was scolded, there was no forcing, there was no sighing or anger because her baby wasn’t doing exactly what she wanted, how she wanted.

I realise humans are different, and the world we’ve built around ourselves is also different, and more complex in so many ways. Our environments have developed into something barely recognisable compared to when humans first started humaning out in the world.

Not only that, but human babies are a lot less self-sufficient than fawns. And I don’t speak deer, so maybe the mother was sighing and rolling her eyes as she went. I’m pretty sure not act of mothering is ever easy or effortless.

This is of course not a perfect parallel and it’s not intended to be.

What I’m saying here is that an idea of consent exists out there in the world. Except it’s not called consent – it’s just various living beings doing things and having an inherent sense of what is safe, what is advisable, where the boundaries lie; an inherent, instinctive sense of what right relationship with each other and the land might look like.

It makes no sense to believe that of all the species, humans would be the only ones without this inherent felt sense. (Of course, it’s possible, because anything is possible!)

I want to believe we too, possess this. We feel trampled and violated and encroached upon when consent is lacking – much like I felt as a child, and I have felt many times as an adult, before I had the words for it. We have intuitive feelings around where lines between ourselves and others lie, or don’t lie, we don’t always have or need the language for it.

As a white European person, I find that the language vastly helps me, in the same way that the word consent is utterly irrelevant to many others.

Our entire society has perpetrated millennia of relationships based on the ability to dominate, extract and control. We have lost, or compromised, our intuition around so many things, including how to love and care for our children, how to be in relationship with them, when to stop and when to say stop.

Our current Euro-Western paradigm basically tells us that if you are more powerful, you get to control, coerce, dominate, cajole, manipulate, patronise, lecture and wield power over those who hold less, in a million big and small ways. If you are more powerful, you get to hold sway over the morality of things. You get to decide what is right and good.

We see this in parents who claim authority over their children, who use the language of parental rights to justify their need to feel ownership over smaller bodies. We also see this in everyday, run of the mill parenting in the Western world, and in the parenting styles we have researched and continue to debate.

Some of us need a word to describe divesting from all of this, and reclaiming ourselves.

The dominant parenting paradigm

When I had my first child, I hadn’t given parenting much thought at all. I figured I would just do what felt right. And then I realised that, when I thought I was doing what came naturally, I was actually simply repeating what I’d internalised growing up - and nothing about that was innate, or natural, or instinctive.

It got me thinking about why we parent the way we do.

Parenting itself, as a thing we do, is a Western, capitalist construct rooted in power over, ‘doing’ and results, writes Alison Gopnik in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter. It is significantly different to parenthood, the state of being a parent. Its focus is measurable ‘success’, maintaining established hierarchies within the family and society at large and assuming universality.

Parenting culture assumes that the parenting frameworks we have ‘discovered’ in the West, can be universalised to other countries, cultures and groups.

I propose that:

· Our current mainstream parenting framework, which includes alternative styles like gentle parenting, still rests on the assumption that a degree of parental authority over children is best, and makes no space for parenting that does not subscribe to a version of authority and power over children. In other words, it still legitimises coercion and does not centre consent.

· Our current most accepted framework is fundamentally flawed, and cannot be applied to many groups of people, nor can it be universalised to the rest of the world.

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Baumrind’s parenting styles

Our current framework is that of academic Diana Baumrind, and it is widely considered to be the definitive parenting paradigm. It tells us there are four main styles of parenting: Authoritarian, Authoritative, Permissive and Uninvolved. Authoritative parenting, according to Baumrind’s and other researcher’s studies, is the most desirable type, and gentle parenting is often located within the Authoritative umbrella.

We all seem to be sold on the idea that being Authoritarian, dictator-like, is not a good idea; and that being Uninvolved and Permissive are big no-nos; but that Authoritative sounds like the right degree of leadership and empathy.

I believe that all four styles are problematic, and here’s why:

They assume that parenting is a results-oriented endeavour, and something we do to our children. The assumption is that if done properly, we can shape our children to achieve a ‘good’ outcomes (which are themselves subjective).

Baumrind’s entire model is rooted in power over. Levels of adult “demandingness” measure the amount of control and authority the adult has over the child, and vice versa. Authoritarian parenting is extremely demanding, whereas Authoritative parents appear to have just the right amount of “demands.” Permissive and Uninvolved both lack any sense of demandingness. All of these models are still held together by the idea that making demands of our children, and somehow forcing, manipulating or cajoling them into complying, is a good idea; and that parenting that lacks expectations and demands (like Permissive parenting), is an absolute failure.

All of these parenting styles ultimately place the adult in a position of control, because whether you’re making demands or dropping them, you are doing it from a position of unilateral control, rather than partnership. YOU get to decide what gets dropped and what doesn’t. YOU get to either impose or not impose your level of “demandingness”, and you get to change your mind on that at any time.

Baumrind’s model is assumed to be universal, but is in fact the product of white Western, capitalist, patriarchal culture. Being parents is universal; parenting culture as something we do, where there is a correct way and a less desirable way, is a recent Western invention.

The mainstream parenting culture we have created does not reflect the work of so many respectful, decolonizing and deconstructing parents.

The way I see it, our work is not so much about what to DO, but much more about what kind of parent we want to BECOME. It’s much more about parenthood, relationships and community; about mothering as an act of care and love, as a counter-cultural, radical act, than it is about parenting.

Alison Gopnik critiques this model when she points out that being a parent looks much more like gardening, than carpentry. We don’t set out to hack away at our children and form them into something we think they (or we) should be. Instead, we plant seeds, we water, add fertiliser, watch over them, perhaps shelter them from the cold or hard rain – and we watch them bloom into whatever they were always meant to be. We are present and supporting, but we’re not actively doing parenting TO them.

There is consent-based practice in gardening. Much like the deer forging a path and assuming her fawn would find her, we humans can also inhabit our parenthood fully, without having to turn it into a project with a desirable outcome.

We can see this all differently

Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes in As We Have Always Done:

“.. the opposite of dispossession is not possession, it is deep, reciprocal, consensual attachment. Indigenous bodies don’t relate to the land by possessing or owning it or having control over it. We relate to the land through connection - generative, affirmative, complex, overlapping, and nonlinear relationship.”

We see the emphasis on ownership in the parental rights movement (parents claim children belong to them), in schooling, in the corporate world, in relationships between men and women, in relationships between dominant groups and more marginalised groups.

This dynamic - the dynamic of possession, control and extraction - is everywhere. It is so normalised that we parent as if we really are the owners of our children, and we don’t question it.

In her writing, Simpson is speaking to her relationship to the land, but when I read it I felt its relevance to my relationship with my children. Many of us were raised to believe we belonged to our parents, and were therefore to do as they said. Simpson’s words speak to how we might conceive of our relationship with our children differently: not owning our children doesn’t mean we disown them, we step back and let the chips fall where they may, we become bystanders. No!

The opposite of not owning our children is not disowning, separation, alienation. It is being in a loving, consent-based, mutual relationship with them, to paraphrase Simpson’s beautiful words.

The opposite of possession is attachment. The opposite of control is not unbridled, unmoored freedom: it’s connection.

This, to me, is the core of consent-based practice. Consent is the antidote to domination and oppression, and in many ways the opposing force. Consent is mutuality, relationship, connection; living and learning with these principles to root us in ourselves and the places we inhabit.

I do not own my children; we are in relationship. It is messy and “nonlinear”, in Simpson’s words, and emergent, and always unfolding.

I cannot tell you how to do it because I don’t even know. I’m testing it. I have no history of attachment, only one of possession. As perhaps you do too.

And also, I cannot tell you because you are not me.

But I can tell you what I value, and how I’m figuring it out.

And I can put to you that perhaps this way of being in relationship has always existed, just with another name, or no name, because it was just the way living things lived. And now we all get to figure out how to find it and co-create it within our homes.

Bodily autonomy: what and why?

I decided not to lead with bodily autonomy, but I’m aware that this is often where we go when we first come across the idea of consent in parenting. This is also how I initially arrived at it, through the valuable work of people who are educating parents and children on how to respect children’s bodily autonomy, and of those who are doing research around children’s ability to make decisions about their bodies.

Bodily autonomy is our right to have ownership over our bodies. This includes but is not limited to our ability to decide how and when to move, rest, or dress, and what, when and how to eat or drink. We get to decide whether we accept or refuse touch. We get to make decisions around what we put inside of our bodies, and what other people can do to our bodies.

Bodily autonomy matters because raising children who feel a sense of agency over their own bodies is a way to prevent physical and sexual abuse, and parenting with consent is a “disruption of rape culture,” as Rosalia Rivera called it when I spoke to her over zoom. Rosalia is a consent educator and founder of Consent Parenting, and her work is focused on fighting child sexual abuse by educating adults and parents about bodily autonomy, boundaries and consent. She calls consent and boundary education “foundational work,” that should happen in connection with abuse prevention work.

Teaching and modeling to our children that their body is their own is crucial in helping to prevent neglect, abuse and grooming, and combat a culture where child abuse, domestic abuse, rape and unwanted physical touch are rife. Few of us would argue that educating our children around no means no and my body my choice is unnecessary.

Fundamentally though, children’s ownership of their bodies is simply a recognition that children are people too, and their bodies are theirs to manage in the same way adults own and manage their own bodies. It branches out into so many areas that as parents we may struggle with: personal hygiene, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, sharing possessions, boundary work, friendships, and more.

I’ll talk more specifically about these later on in the book.

Mental, emotional and spiritual integrity.

Many of us are easily sold on bodily autonomy and why it matters, but take a little longer to warm up to a more complete idea of consent, one that incorporates children’s minds and spirits too.

Why are we all over preserving our children’s physical integrity, but we can’t quite wrap our heads around why they should have ownership of their thoughts, experiences, life decisions and learning?

I recognise this can seem radical but to me, it’s all connected.

Consent is consent; sovereignty is sovereignty; coercion is coercion - no matter which part of your body and being it’s happening to.

Consent doesn’t suddenly stop at how to learn, what to do with their days, whether to receive medical treatment, what to believe in. Consent doesn’t technically stop at anything. It’s all-encompassing.

It is the all-encompassing solution to power over, no matter what form that power is taking – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.

I think part of the answer is that we don’t trust children and young people to know what they should be learning, deciding, creating, feeling, believing, and so on. We trust them to have sovereignty of their physical bodies (to an extent!) but not of their minds - even though the two things are not actually separate, and the lines between the mind, body and spirit are in fact blurry.

I asked Phoebe yesterday, for fun, “How do people know what they don’t know?” and she said that you can’t know everything, of course, but you can know more of what’s out there by going out there - talking to people, doing things, researching, reading, being curious, being open about the world.

She understands that ownership of her mind doesn’t mean she’ll live in a vacuum or be left to her own devices; it doesn’t mean she’ll be making all the wrong decisions and learn none of the things she needs for life.

It means she gets to preserve her mental wholeness, AND learn, make decisions, have experiences. Both things can be true at once.

When we move from just bodily autonomy to all-encompassing consent-based-ness, we are understanding that consent is, in Sophie Christophy’s words, “the ethical thing.”

The United Nations’ Convention for the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) covers children’s rights to participation, which significantly overlap with their right to consent and consent-based participation. For example, a child has the right “to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations” and the right to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion”, among many other rights to participate in decision-making within their family, community and beyond.

Consent is not only the morally right thing, but also a human rights and a children’s rights issue. It is a freedom issue, a child liberation issue, and an issue of what Iris Chen, author, intersectional unschooler and founder of the Untigering movement, calls “the sovereignty of children.”

A word on the language of rights

Children’s rights to participation, while embedded within the UNCRC, were not actually exercised in the drawing up of the framework (no children actually participated in it!), and in practice participation rights often come into conflict with children’s rights to provision and protection.

I will be talking about rights in the context of consent, from a lens of children’s participation, because I believe the ability to freely consent is a child’s right. But I am also aware that children’s rights are in essence Western constructs, dominated and created by adult discourses, and established without much consultation with children.

There is a definite tension in proclaiming that these rights are universally applicable, because they lack the plurality of the global human experience, not to mention the input of a diverse group of children. In spite of this, our rights frameworks are still important in setting down expectations for the treatment and involvement of children.

I’m choosing to sit with this tension throughout the book, because I think we can hold both truths: children hold rights, AND rights are not an absolute truth about all children everywhere. Children hold rights, AND they are essentially adult constructs that don’t always match up with children’s experiences, and that don’t usually emerge after consultation with children themselves. Children hold participation rights, AND they didn’t actually participate in the framing of these rights.

I will also use the term liberation, and while this book is only indirectly about that, I define youth liberation as the freeing of children and young people from imposed systems and structures that oppress, dehumanize and discriminate against them.

Liberation is best defined by the group in question – and while I was once a child and I can speak to that, I cannot fully speak about what youth liberation should look like in 2024.

I have seen youth liberation defined in multiple ways, and containing all or some of these points, but also not limited to them:

Recognizing that children are people who hold rights, not future adults or property
Stopping violence and harm against young people
Freedom from all forms of oppression: racism, ableism, sexism, poverty, transphobia, ageism, and more.
Supporting, listening to and intentionally involving young people
A practice of challenging the subordination of young people
The right to a safe, healthy future (this intersects with climate justice that is often led by young people)
an aspect of abolitionist practice, which works to dismantle institutional hierarchy and violence, coercion, punishment and policing.

In their book, Innocence and Corruption, youth liberationist, author and young person Aiyana Goodfellow writes, “The only means of liberation from our empires of blood is through the birthing, raising, and safety of children as a central, interdependent, collective practice that includes the voices of the young people ourselves. This allows us to be accountable, open, and protected. It means young people can be autonomous rather than disempowered.”

I believe that consent-based practice is what I, as a mother and adult, can do to further the liberation of my own, and all children.

So why do we care again?

For me, consent is the baseline for living in relationship. Without an understanding of consent and a commitment to a culture of consent, with all humans but especially with our young people, there will be power struggles, feelings of shame, internalising of assumptions around who we are and how we are less than, disconnection, fraying of relationships.

I know this intellectually, but I’ve also experienced it. I wasn’t always focused on centering consent in my life, mothering and home.

But it also matters on a wider level. It matters because we are all individual humans worthy of love and belonging, and we all seek to live in community in ways that are respectful to our own bodily, mental, emotional and spiritual autonomy, as well as other people’s. We all deserve for our humanity to be preserved, honoured and respected.

We all deserve to make choices without the fear of repercussions; this is the true meaning of consent-based practice.

It matters because the ability to inhabit our own autonomy, have ownership of ourselves and make our own decisions are human rights, and vehicles for the liberation and freedom of children and of all people.

Thanks you for reading!

I would love to hear comments, thoughts, reflections and would be happy to answer any questions below.