Kids should learn about consent, and learn that their bodies are their own, at the same time they learn the alphabet, writes Donal O’Keeffe.
“I was walking down St Patrick’s Street in Cork, wearing a vest top, because it was summer,” says Louise O’Neill. “I think I was 12.
“You know, when you’re that age, you’re not conscious of your body in that way. I just remember these guys walking past and one of them brushed his hand against my breast and said, ‘Oh look at the tits on that’.
“And I was 12. I was a child. I think it was the first time I had this sense of ‘Oh I’m not actually a human being, I’m a “that”, I’m a collection of body parts’. And they can be touched without my consent.”
Louise O’Neill is a force of nature. Both of her novels have been international best-sellers and her weekly Irish Examiner column seems responsible for approximately 50% of that paper’s letters page. That said, I think her second novel has taken on a significance perhaps greater than its own power as a work of literature.
“Asking For It” is beautifully-written and it grips the reader from the start. In an Ireland where the parish – and the parish priest – can turn out to shake hands with a convicted sex attacker (as happened in the 2009 case of Danny Foley in Tralee) it often reads unbearably close to documentary.
The novel has sparked a serious national and international discussion about rape culture. O’Neill has also made an RTÉ2 documentary, “Asking For It? Reality Bites“, which aired last week. As the journalist and broadcaster Sean Moncrieff said, “Louise O’Neill’s documentary… should be shown to every teenager in the country, because she’s threaded… together really, really well (the topics of) consent, and rape, and the pornification of culture”.
O’Neill’s documentary contends that Ireland has gone from a grey, Catholic, sexually-repressed 1950s country to a hyper-sexualised, pornified world and has done so without almost any discernible transition. Any sober analysis of today’s Ireland would tend to agree with this interpretation.
Dublin colleges recently introduced mandatory consent classes, a move derided by some. However, with one in four female TCD students reporting they have experienced sexual assault, consent workshops seem the minimum-necessary first step.
Watching O’Neill’s documentary, it becomes apparent that we need urgently to change the way in which we educate our children and ourselves about the twin concepts of bodily autonomy and consent. Kids should surely learn about consent, and learn that their bodies are their own, at the same time they learn the alphabet.
Consent can be taught in an age-appropriate way. In fact, the “Stay Safe” programme already has a good framework in place, although I would suggest that kids need to be introduced to it earlier and more affirmatively.
It’s worth remembering that when “Stay Safe” was introduced, the Usual Suspects did everything in their power to block it, at every opportunity accidentally-on-purpose referring to it as “The Safe Sex Programme”. It struck me as particularly strange that – at the height of revelations of clerical sex abuse – right-wing Catholic fundamentalists were so frenzied in their crusade to ensure that little children remained vulnerable. Odd, that.
We also need to get serious about sex education for our children. To those saying kids should be allowed to remain ‘innocent’, it’s worth noting that eleven is now the average age at which children access pornography. With hard-core pornography instantly available and free, parents now face a stark choice: educate your kids about sex or let porn be their first, warped lesson.
We need too to stop blaming victims. In cases of rape and sexual crime, we need to stop asking if the victim was wearing a short skirt or if she was ‘leading him on’. The fault in rape is always completely with the rapist and we need to stop wondering whether the victim was ‘asking for it’.
O’Neill’s documentary features a very moving interview with Niamh Ní Dhomhnaill. Her former partner, Magnus Meyer Hustveidt, had written to her confessing that he had repeatedly raped her while she slept. In his initial sentencing last year, he was given a seven year suspended sentence. In Ireland, a man can actually confess to rape and still – in his initial sentencing – receive no jail time.
Talking about our culture of victim-blaming, Ní Dhomhnaill says “I don’t think it’s just that we blame ourselves… I don’t think that you just – in a vacuum – feel shame. Shame is put on you, and we feel it because we live in a society that asks how did this happen, how did you let it happen. You know, in my case my ‘short skirt’ was not waking up.”
As the law stands, rape is defined as sex without consent. Which might seem straightforward, if not for the fact that we actually have no legal definition of consent. It might seem reasonable to suggest that defining in law the concept of consent might be more of a pressing concern for our legislators. But then, I suppose ambivalence about defining the concept of consent in Irish law is hardly surprising, given that, until 1990, a woman could not refuse to have sex with her husband.
Section 9 of the Criminal Law (Rape) (Amendment) Act 1990 states that the failure to offer resistance does not amount to consent. This is the only reference in Irish legislation to consent and the issue has been otherwise let to be developed through case law, with the Department of Justice previously saying that the courts have confirmed that consent requires voluntary agreement by a person at the age of consent and with the necessary mental capacity.
Sexual violence support groups have condemned this as a legislative grey area and the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland has recommended a definition similar to that adopted in England and Wales in the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, section 74.
In that English and Welsh legislation, consent is defined as: “A person consents if (s)he agrees by choice, and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice.”
Last week, the Justice Minister and Tánaiste, Frances Fitzgerald, said she was considering adopting into Irish law a similar definition of consent. No urgency there, Tánaiste.
“I think we live in a society that doesn’t want to talk about sexual violence,” O’Neill says.
Well, we live in a country where weekly, we see fresh horrors of rape and sexual violence. We live in a climate where judges seem to spend their time second-guessing the Court of Appeal and making excuses for sexual predators. We live in a world where – at the time of writing – history balances on a knife-edge as to whether the next president of the United States will be a man who actually brags about sexually assaulting women.
The 2002 Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland Report found that one third of Irish citizens will experience sexual violence. Of that, one in ten reports it. From there, we have a 1-2% conviction rate.
Force of nature that she is, Louise O’Neill presents an unarguable case.
The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s 24 Hour National Helpline is 1800 778 888
“Asking For It? Reality Bites” is available now on the RTÉ Player.
