Chapter 5: Beyond Yes and No: Practising Consent in Children’s Everyday Lives

Sexual violence’s alarming prevalence demands action to challenge the gendered and generational relations that sustain injustice. This chapter introduces a nuanced model of consent that, if utilised to inform adults’ everyday practices with children, could empower children to identify and engage in healthy relationships and manage sexual victimisation. Inadequate sex education in adolescence engenders harmful beliefs about consent, which hinder young people’s abilities to navigate sexual relationships and limit the extent to which sexual assault survivors can understand their trauma. Accordingly, effective consent education is critical to protect and empower all human beings. Drawing on decades of childhood studies research that exemplifies the ways in which children learn through experience, this chapter argues that, by practising consent with children, adults can facilitate children’s knowledge of this moral concept. To equip adults with the thorough understanding of consent necessary to engage in truly consensual relationships, this chapter presents a theoretical explanation of children’s agency, recognising that structure, personal elements, and relationships collectively influence, and are shaped by, children’s participation. Based on a recognition of parents’ distinct role in children’s education, this model is examined in the context of children’s experiences in the home. Specifically, this analysis considers the ethics of corporal punishment and explores parental practices that could better facilitate children’s learning. The themes in this chapter emphasise the dangers of assumptions and raise fundamental questions about the ways in which society approaches human dignity and justice.