When I was 21, I had a non-consensual sexual experience. I was upstairs at The Academy nightclub, dancing with my girlfriend. It was well into the night, about half an hour before closing time. Half of the revellers were stumbling around drunk but I was fully sober. I remember everything vividly: the terrible, pulsating music, the cloying scent of spilled alcopops, the sweltering heat. I was in the middle of an impressively arrhythmic hip manoeuvre when I felt a hand slide across my rear end and clasp my right buttock firmly.
Considering that I was holding both of Catríona’s hands in my own, my first thought was that someone was attempting to pickpocket me. The presumptive thief was a young woman around the same age as me with that glazed-over look of inebriation in her eyes. As soon as I caught her gaze she quickly turned her head away. I transferred my wallet to my front pocket and kept dancing. Thirty seconds later, I was grabbed again in the same manner. This time when I turned around, the girl didn’t even bother to put up a pretence. I realised that I wasn’t being pickpocketed. I was being groped.
After the third buttock-grab I had had enough. My girlfriend and I moved away towards the exit. It didn’t seem worthwhile to report it to the bouncers and I honestly suspected that they’d just laugh in my face if I did.
Some will say that young women need to be educated about the do’s and don’ts of sexual contact, perhaps via a consent class. Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union’s (TCDSU) “What is Consent?” video certainly presents some ideas that I agree with wholeheartedly. Consent is based on communication between partners, both verbally and through body language, and you should pay attention to your partner to make sure that they are as into what’s going on as you are.
However, the video is lacking in two key areas. Firstly, we’re told that partners who are “too drunk” cannot give consent. This is obviously true in cases where someone has passed out or is barely able to stand up, but it becomes difficult to gauge in the traditional Irish setting for courtship, which very often involves excessive alcohol consumption. We all know of people with stories of waking up naked beside a total stranger, who is equally bemused about this development themselves. Perhaps we’ve even been that person.
What does this model of consent have to say about this highly common occurrence? Both parties were clearly too drunk to know what was happening, so are they both guilty of misconduct? We live in a pervasive drink culture in which a huge amount of the sex had is drunken sex. Drunk people will inevitably partake in dalliances which they would have categorically avoided if they were sober.
Drink-driving and drunken brawls are also examples of chemically induced activity that people later live to regret. The difference is that we expect mature adults to take responsibility for their actions in these situations – being drunk is no excuse. While the victim should never be dismissed for having consumed alcohol, the same approach should be taken to sex, and any reasonable consent class should also warn students of what they might do whilst under the influence of alcohol in order for them to be able to properly take care of themselves.
This ties in with the second point of contention: there is too little emphasis on personal responsibility and an overemphasis on paying vigilant attention to your partner’s reactions. As mentioned previously, body language is a good indicator but it is not a perfect one. It could be that your partner gave an enthusiastic “yes” 30 seconds ago, but is actually unsure. You might send your partner what you believe are obvious cues only for them to not be immediately noticed.
The necessity for consent classes is frequently justified by the 2014 TCDSU consent workshop survey which claimed that 25 per cent of female and five per cent of male Trinity students had a “non-consensual sexual experience” in College social settings. My day job is research, but frankly, you don’t need to be a scientist to see the huge number of issues with this survey.
Since it was a self-selected anonymous survey from SurveyMonkey, it doesn’t represent a random sample of the student population – a huge problem if the surveyors hope to generalise their results to the entirety of the College, which they do. It was also promoted on social media, meaning that anyone could answer it, including non-students. The same person could even answer it multiple times if they so desired.
When one considers these factors, the sample size of just over 1,000 students is paltry. The questions asked were also vague, with important terms left undefined by the surveyors: the term “non-consensual sexual experience” encompasses everything from experiences like mine in The Academy, to sexual assault and rape. To my mind, it is insulting to victims of the most serious crimes to bin the data in such a sloppy fashion.
Therefore, it is my view that the survey shouldn’t be interpreted as a piece of research and it certainly shouldn’t be used as a strong basis for a university-wide policy.
It’s up to students to decide if they want to attend the non-mandatory consent workshops TCDSU offers. Perhaps the new, Trinity-specific workshops that the union are creating will offer better advice to students on this issue. However, if the “What is Consent?” video is any indication of what the consent classes will be like, students shouldn’t expect to have all of their questions answered.
