A new campaign is lobbying the government to enshrine ‘affirmative consent’ into law – but it risks doing more harm than good
On Monday, a new campaign named “I’m Asking For It” launched in the UK. Created by non-profit organisation Right to Equality and creative agency CPB London, the campaign is calling for the UK government to enshrine “affirmative consent” into law, which would mean “anything less than a clear, uncoerced, and informed confirmation of consent like ‘yes’ cannot qualify as consent in the eyes of the law”. It’s fronted by Dr Charlotte Proudman, the barrister who founded Right to Equality, and actress Emily Atack, who has previously campaigned against cyberflashing.
The campaign’s intentions are admirable. The charity Rape Crisis estimates 798,000 women across England and Wales are raped or sexually assaulted every year, amounting to one in 30 women. One in four women have been raped or sexually assaulted at some point in their adult lives. Rape is the most underreported crime: five in six women who are raped don’t report it to the police, and little wonder, given that just two per cent of rapes recorded by police between October 2022 and September 2023 resulted in someone being charged that same year. There is an issue, clearly, with rape culture in the UK. Dr Proudman’s campaign was created and launched with the aim of doing something about it.
But the campaign falls short. Worse – it perpetuates reductive, false, dangerous ideas about sex, rape, and consent.
First, there’s the campaign’s branding. It’s easy to parse what the campaigners were trying to do: ‘reclaim’ the age-old defence weaponised by rapists, flipping it on its head and recasting women as decisive, liberated, and empowered agents. But is it possible to disentangle the phrase “asking for it” from its origins as a means of discrediting rape survivors? When rapists say “she was asking for it”, they’re talking about rape – not sex – and many survivors have been quick to express their disgust at the insensitive slogan on social media. To make matters worse, campaign organisers are also selling T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “I’m Asking For It”. It’s clumsy at best, tone-deaf at worst.
The actual aims of the campaign are questionable, too. By calling on the government to change the law to require a clear ‘yes’ to sex, campaigners are flattening what consent actually is. Consent is not a single ‘yes’ expressed at the beginning of any sexual experience – consent is active, continuous, and can be withdrawn at any point. Survivors are often coerced into saying yes by their abusers too, and some disabled people can struggle to communicate verbally.
I am sure there were good intentions behind this but good intentions aren’t enough. As a survivor I can not think of a worse slogan for this campaign. And wtf is this horror of a T-Shirt? I wish it didn’t exist. https://t.co/19ddmkwyxD pic.twitter.com/wuw7jCwCsX
— Amelia Loulli (@ALoulli) March 5, 2024
Granted, the campaign website does state that “affirmative consent can be withdrawn at any time, and cannot be obtained by expressed or implied force, threats, or coercion”. But given how much rape survivors are already screwed over by the justice system, how is someone supposed to demonstrate that they withdrew consent or were coerced? The campaign claims it will put the burden of proof on those accused of sexual assault as opposed to survivors, but it’s unclear how this will work in practice.
The campaign also implicitly perpetuates the harmful, pervasive idea that sex is something done by men to women, and that it is ‘empowering’ for women alone to ensure that all of their sexual experiences are ‘good’. As Katherine Angel writes in Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, “consent, and its conceit of absolute clarity, places the burden of good sexual interaction on women’s behaviour – on what they want and on what they can know and say about their wants; on their ability to perform a confident sexual self in order to ensure that sex is mutually pleasurable and non-coercive. Woe betide she who does not know herself and speak that knowledge.” With this in mind, perhaps we would be better off promoting a mutual, dynamic approach to sex for heterosexual couples, as opposed to placing the onus for ‘managing’ sex squarely on women.
In any case, I’m unconvinced that more laws will make women safer. Rape is already illegal, after all, and rape still persists. The roots of the issue run deep – too deep for a snappy slogan and provocative marketing campaign to change.