The post Consensual relationships appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.
]]>In this post I focus on consensual relationships. Many thanks to Justin Hancock for the podcast conversations which were the starting points for these posts. You can find those over on megjohnandjustin.com and on our Patreon. If you want to learn more about consent, there’s no better place to start than Justin’s new book Can We Talk About Consent? Available for pre-order now.
You can listen to me and Justin discussing consent in romantic relationships, specifically here. In this post I want to open this out to consider all relationships. You can also see me talking about these topics on this consent culture video.
The current moment highlights the importance of turning our attention to consensual relationships in several ways.
First, domestic abuse has gone up globally by 20% during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the UK calls for domestic abuse helplines jumped by a half in the first month or so and a further spike is predicted post lockdown. Boots pharmacies began offering safe spaces for people to go if they were in abusive situations, and legislation was put in place to help survivors to escape abusive homes during lockdown. All of this led to domestic abuse being called the ‘shadow pandemic’. So we see clearly the scale of non-consensual relationships, and just how important this is to address. Being stuck in together during lockdown has highlighted to many people the areas in their relationships which are not as consensual as they would like them to be.
Then the #BlackLivesMatter uprising highlighted massive flaws in the policing and criminal justice systems. Some people responded to calls to dismantle and abolish these systems by asking ‘what about’ survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault? However, others pointed out that the criminal justice system has never served survivors. Survivors often experience legal processes as retraumatising and gaslighting, given the minimising, denial, victim blame, and perpetrator defense which often happens in court cases – mirroring how survivors are treated in wider culture. Number of cases passed for charges is low, as rates continue to rise.
Many have suggested that policing is ill-equipped to deal with sexual and relationship abuse, and that involving the police is actively dangerous when those involved are people of colour. For these reasons, people have turned to alternative models like funding other forms of support for survivors, building accountable communities, and transformative justice.
Alex Iantaffi and I had a conversation with Deana Ayers on the Gender Stories podcast about how police feel necessary in communities where people keep themselves and their families separate and private – a particularly white western middle class heteronormative model. Alternative models include building relationships and support systems in community, and learning how to open the windows on our relationships and support each other when our dynamics have fallen into non-consensual or traumatic patterns.
The #MeToo movement highlighted the commonality of sexual forms of abuse and assault. At least 1 in 5 women and 1 in 20 men have had someone try to have sex with them against their will. In most cases when sex happens against someone’s will, it is with a known person, mostly a current or former intimate partner.
This highlights the fact that we need far more focus on how to avoid and address sexual – and other forms of – abuse in the home and within known relationships. Instead, media focus tends to be on stranger sexual assault of women. This potentially puts women at more risk because fear of stranger danger constrains them to private home spaces. It also makes it harder to speak out about assault with known people when it occurs, and about assault in other gendered dynamics.
Non-consensual sex often happens in contexts where other forms of non-consent are normalised, so we need to explore how to cultivate cultures of consent around all aspects of our relationships, not just sex. This is also important because emotional forms of non-consent can be just as damaging as more sexual and physical forms, but often harder to recognise and to open up about.
With all forms of non-consent it’s rarely obviously present from the outset of a relationship but rather it gradually creeps into a relationship (like the foot in the door technique, or the boiling a frog fable). This makes it hard to recognise because it seems normal due to past experience, and because beginning to question it would mean recognising all the previous moments of non-consent when we didn’t say something about it.
It’s also important to consider these questions in all kinds of relationships, not just partner relationships, because non-consent in friendships, family relationships, colleague relationships, and so on are also very common, and often go unrecognised because of the focus on romantic/family relationships, and because terms like ‘bullying’ are used which downplay and normalise peer-to-peer or colleague-to-colleague non-consensual and abusive behaviour.
The wider culture of relationships normalises non-consent, with common tropes like it being legitimate to pressurise or manipulate somebody into a particular kind of relationship with you, and to do particular things (e.g. go for a drink with you, eat the kind of food you enjoy, take the kind of holiday you prefer).
It’s also presented as valid to attempt to shape a person into who you want them to be, to focus on that relationship to the exclusion of others, and to try to convince them to stay with you even if they don’t want to.
Close relationships are often presented as private so we shouldn’t share what’s going on in them with anybody else, we should present them as perfect on social media and never talk about the difficult parts.
These tropes are particularly prevalent for romantic relationships, but also often apply to best friendships, family relationships, and close collegiate relationships, for example.
Relationship researchers find that it is very common for people to engage in behaviours like shaming forms of criticism, mocking contempt, defensive blame, and stonewalling or shutting down in relationships which are struggling, all of which are examples of non-consensual behaviours, but are rarely framed in this way because it is so normalised in our culture to treat people in these ways within relationships.
The common idea with physical, sexual, and emotional abuse is that the majority of relationships are ‘normal’ and non-abusive, and a minority are abusive which is a very specific issue and requires a completely different approach to ‘normal’ relationships. This division is unhelpful because it encourages us – as survivors and as a wider culture – to keep asking the binary question of whether a situation is ‘bad enough’ to count as abuse, and only counting it, and feeling able to address it, if it meets those criteria: often the legal criteria.
Also, this binary perpetuates the idea that there are bad ‘abusers’ and then there is everyone else who is perfectly good and safe. This makes talking about consent in relationships really hard because we feel like we have to present ourselves as perfectly good and safe – and deny or defend any non-consensual behaviours – lest we be seen as an abuser and rejected, called out, or reported.
We need to acknowledge that we’re all likely to behave non-consensually at times in such a non-consensual culture, when most of us were brought up with these relationship norms, rather than denying our capacity for non-consent, and focusing on policing and punishing others for it.
The criteria for ‘abuse’ is a low bar for a relationship: the sense that if it doesn’t meet the legal criteria for abuse/assault then it is fine. Instead we should focus on how all relationships can be as consensual and beneficial for all involved as possible, recognising that the level of consent present is probably on a spectrum which goes up and down over time.
We can define consent as the degree to which people feel safe-enough and free-enough in a relationship to be open about their needs and boundaries. This is inevitably going to change over time, impacted by outer circumstances, trauma, how well-supported we are, and more.
So we might ask ‘how can we maximise how consensual this relationship is for all involved?’ – as the people in that relationship, and as the supportive people around that relationship. Then, if we feel like the level of consent is not good enough – if someone starts feeling unsafe or their freedom constrained for example – we can know that that is enough reason to ask for that to be dealt with, or to step away if others aren’t up for that.
Thinking about all the following features of non/consent on spectrums rather than as legalistic abuse/non-abuse binaries can be helpful:
In addition to working our way through the previous questions, tuning into our body and feelings is an important way of identifying how consensual a relationship dynamic is. It can be difficult though, particularly for those with a history of trauma, and/or when gaslighting is present, to tune into – and trust – our feelings. Also it can be confusing when non-consensual dynamics coexist, for example, with strong love feelings, exciting sex, a close connection between you during the good times, and/or deep mutual understanding.
Remember that non-consent is not always conscious on the part of the people involved. They may well not know they’re behaving in non-consensual ways, and/or these dynamics may be so familiar from their past that they don’t recognise that they are a problem. If everyone involved doesn’t feel free enough or safe enough to be themselves and to express their needs and boundaries, then it’s not a consensual dynamic.
Signs that a dynamic has become non-consensual to a concerning level include the following:
Unless there are clear sexual or physical violations going on, it can be hard in relationships to know whether you are overriding your own consent (perhaps because this was the way of relating you learnt in the past), or whether the other person is overriding your consent, or whether it’s more of a mutual non-consensual dynamic between you.
It can be helpful to remember that it doesn’t matter whether this dynamic is 95% down to them and 5% you, or vice versa, or 50/50. The thing to do when it feels non-consensual remains the same:
Once you are feeling clearer, calmer, and stronger you can get a sense of whether a more consensual dynamic is possible in this relationship, and what kind of relationship container would be necessary for that. For example, it may require rethinking whether you cohabit, or whether you see each other as often, whether you share finances, or how you name the relationship.
It’s also useful to think about what systems and structures of support you’d need in order to keep an eye on the dynamic and to keep moving towards greater consent. Some form of individual work for each person around their patterns is helpful, as well as ensuring that everyone has a network of support around them so you aren’t each other’s main support while you’re going through this together. Forms of mediation, transformative justice, or therapy together can also help address the dynamics between you.
The other person should be up for you doing what you need if you articulate it this way and if they are committed to having a consensual relationship with you. If they’re not hearing you, or meeting you there, then it may be necessary to pull back further or to step away.
If you struggle to do this, it’s worth remembering that remaining in a situation where someone is getting hurt – whether that is somebody else or whether it is you – doesn’t help anybody, including those who are behaving non-consensually. It often keeps them stuck behaving in habitual ways which are often very painful and shameful for them, whether or not they’re able to acknowledge that. Remaining in such situations also tends to take so much of our energy that we’re not much good for ourselves, for the things we find meaningful, or for anybody else in our lives. Taking yourself out of the dynamic enables everyone – if they’re up for it – to look at their part in it, and hopefully to address that.
There’s more from Justin about signs of non-consensual relationships and how to address them here, including how to access support if it is difficult or dangerous to leave.
Ideally we would change the whole culture to depict relationships far more consensually – so that we have models for this – and to support everyone to relate more consensually. In the meantime hopefully we can try to shift the consent cultures in our communities and networks. If it takes a village to raise a child, perhaps it also takes a village to support a consensual relationship.
Moving towards a culture of more consensual relationships could involve things like:
Taking the key ideas about sexual consent and applying them to relationships, we might consider the following:
You can find more of my resources about consent on my consent work page.
You can check out more of this year’s #IDOConsent content and events here.
Patreon link: If you found this useful, please feel free to support my Patreon.
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