Keywords

In early 2021, almost a decade after being sexually assaulted by another student who attended an elite private boys’ school in Sydney, Australia, Chanel Contos posted a question to her Instagram account. It read: ‘If you live in Sydney: have you or has anyone close to you ever experienced sexual assault from someone who went to an all-boys school?’ The response was rapid and consistent: ‘within 24 hours, over 200 people replied “yes”’ (www.teachusconsent.com.au; Mackinlay et al. 2023). Contos rightly suspected these responses were just the tip of the iceberg and set about develo** a website where women could post their experiences of sexual assault when they were at high school. There was a dual purpose to the website’s functionality, it also encompassed an online petition demanding better and more universal consent education in Australian schools. Since then, the Teach Us Consent website has received more than 45,000 signatures on the petition and more than 6700 testimonies.

Like much feminist activism, and more recently digital feminist activism, Contos’ work came from a deeply personal place. She designed and launched the website while studying for a master’s in gender and education in London. But it was her lived experience, and the associated trauma, of being sexually assaulted during her high school years, which sparked the motivation for Teach Us Consent. When Contos spoke with a friend about their experiences, both wondered: ‘do they even know what they did to us?’ (Contos 2021). The digital testimonies that later flowed through the Teach Us Consent website suggested that the answer was no. The vast number of these testimonies disrupt dominant understandings, or legal definitions, of how rape and sexual harm are experienced amongst students attending elite high schools in Australia and the Teach Us Consent website is clear in its call for ‘more holistic and earlier consent education’ in Australian schools (n.d.). Specifically, that the consent education must teach them to demolish rape culture. This is important because essential to Contos’ project are the parallel goals of not only communicating a collective story about the hidden story of sexual harm amongst young women but also encouraging powerful educational and government institutions to consider the importance of how, and what, is being communicated in Australia’s consent education programs.

The Teach Us Consent activism puts consent education in Australian schools as its primary advocacy objective. However, it’s important to note upfront, the significant work that has been done by educators, researchers, and policymakers in the area of addressing issues of gender violence in Australian schools (Mackinlay et al. 2023).1 Gender justice educator and scholar Amanda Keddie notes that while she is ‘heartened to hear calls for better gender justice and sexuality education’, she’s also ‘a little fatigued’ given the ‘excellent curriculum and pedagogic resources and research’ developed, implemented, and reviewed by colleagues who have been working to address issues of gender injustice in schools for decades (2023, 504). Much of this work has been occurring under the auspice of ‘respectful relationships education’ (RRE), a ‘holistic approach to school-based, primary prevention of gender-based violence’ (Kearney et al. 2016, 104). Of note is Victoria’s Building Respectful Relationships: Step** Out Against Gender-Based Violence, developed by leading Australian gender justice education scholar Debbie Ollis (2018).

Yet, an evaluation report into RRE programs Australia-wide by Monash University’s Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, voiced concern at the fact that schools often approach RRE in ‘ad hoc ways’, ranging from sexuality and relationships education, through to pastoral care, child protection, and gender studies (Pfitzner et al. 2022, 12). Keddie notes that while beneficial, respectful relationships education is an ‘adult-centred’ approach to sexuality education, which often fails to address the complexities of sexual consent. Specifically, the gendered dimensions of discourses and power relations which position women as being without agency or desire, as the gatekeepers, responsible for containing and controlling boys’ and mens’ sexual desires (2023, 505). Australia’s education system is not alone in grappling to reduce sexual violence and improve understandings of sexual consent amongst a school-aged cohort. In other jurisdictions, such as the US and the UK, researchers reveal that educators face similar issues: policies around sex education vary depending on jurisdiction or state; varying degrees of attention is paid to sexual violence or sexual consent; and students still remain confused and uncertain about what obtaining consent actually involves (Muscari et al. 2022, 2; Setty 2022). This is important when we think about how consent is being communicated. If educators’ opinions, methods, and programs on teaching sexual consent remain diverse then it follows that young people are struggling when it comes to communicating their feelings, desires, disinterest, or opposition to a sexual encounter.

Analysing the Teach Us Consent testimonies, therefore, provides a valuable insight into not only how young women students experienced consent being coerced or bypassed but also how it was, or in many cases was not, communicated. This is important: a renewed focus on ‘communicative competence’ challenges arguments that ‘total clarity precedes ethical action’ (Harris 2018, 155). Examining the discourse around sexual consent amongst high school students reveals not only how consent is being articulated but also the importance of understanding how power, and lack of power, operates in these often emotionally and physically distressing situations. Doing so reveals the nuances and ambiguities inherent in sexual encounters and problematises an affirmative consent model solely based on a clear communication of agreement or not. Through this approach consent communication considers not only a yes or no question, but also, is it ethically or morally right?

This chapter argues that the Teach Us Consent testimonies reveal the content of any consent education program needs to focus on the nuance and ambiguity within communication around consent and sexual interaction. To do so is a risky approach, one which acknowledges that communication around consent may involve acknowledging that which appears (initially at least) invisible or ambiguous. However, this research does build on the work of other feminist communication scholars (e.g., Harris 2018) in advocating for this risk, by showing that discourse around consent does not necessarily mirror reality, nor does it necessarily support affirmative consent strategies. Such strategies (often shaped and supported by feminists) encompass the long-held mantras of “yes means yes” and “no means no” (Harris 2018, 158). These testimonies emphasise the complexities of consent, refusing to situate silence as a signal of acquiescence. By making silence visible, these testimonies counter troubling hegemonic rape scripts and precise definitions of rape and sexual assault. They also trouble a culture of rape that insists on spotlighting the behaviour of women’s bodies and normalising and ignoring men’s language and actions. In doing so they provide valuable insights into the nuances of communication in consent, and therefore the kind of consent education needed in the future.

This chapter first situates the Teach Us Consent petition and website within the context of Australia’s #MeToo movement and provides an overview of the increasingly digitised approach girls and women are taking to bear witness to rape culture, sexual violence, misogyny, and everyday sexism (Keller et al. 2018; Serisier 2018). Next, it outlines the Australian government’s consent education response to Contos’ activism and considers it in the context of Australia’s elite private school system and the way representations of powerful hegemonic masculinities and femininities emerge in those schools. It then considers this in the context of rape culture, specifically the way hegemonic “rape scripts” reinforce social and cultural attitudes when it comes to understandings of consent. The feminist theoretical and methodologist approaches to this work are then explained and later applied to the analysis of the Teach Us Consent testimonies. In doing so this chapter considers the way these testimonies work to rewrite rape culture through a rejection of scripts that position certain relationships as safe and certain communication methods as discourses of love and care.

Teach Us Consent and Australia’s #MeToo Movement

While the #MeToo movement has been a global push for an end to gender violence, and sexual assault amongst high school students specifically is not unique to Australia, the year 2021 was an important moment for Australian women demanding gender justice. In January 2021, sexual assault survivor and activist, Grace Tame was awarded Australian of the Year after speaking out about her experience of being groomed and raped by a teacher while attending a private school. Chanel Contos launched Teach Us Consent in February. But it was March 2021 when thousands of Australian women and their supporters took to the streets in protest marches, incensed by the serious rape, sexual assault, and harassment allegations emerging from within Australia’s parliament house (Hill 2021). Alongside copious reports of gendered harassment and violence from senior members of parliament towards staffers, was the allegation a former ministerial staffer, Brittany Higgins, had been raped in the Australian parliament by another staffer (Hitch 2021). Anger reverberated around the nation about the proliferation of gendered violence towards women working in the nation’s most powerful institution.

The slogan “metoo” emerged from the work of African American activist Tarana Burke in 2006 as part of a grass-roots work to empower girls and young women of colour who were survivors of sexual violence. The words later became a twitter hashtag in October 2017 in response to sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein (Mendes et al. 2019; Gilmore 2020). The hashtag’s capacity as ‘a practice of bearing witness’ (Gilmore 2020, 25) means it has had global capacity as an online feminist activist campaign, galvanising other women and activists worldwide to reflect and push against the culture of silence, shame and fear embedded in rape culture. #metoo is commonly used as the moment from which to explore contemporary concepts of digital feminist activism (e.g., Gilmore, 2020; Loney-Howes et al., 2021; Fileborn and Loney-Howes, 2019; Mendes et al. 2019, 2019; Trott, 2021; Nicholls, 2021); however, online feminist communication campaigns designed to raise awareness about issues of consent and gender violence have been occurring long before the #metoo movement of 2017. These campaigns act both as the precursor and/or complement embodied feminist action held concurrently on both the streets and in the digital world.

The movement of women’s testimony to the online space and within a variety of digital platforms signals an interplay between female bodies and digital feminist protests. It also signals a desire or need to broaden dominant understandings of what rape can be. This is important: online testimonies are communicating stories about breaches of not only sexual consent, but also stories about a failure to listen, and respond, to women experiencing sexual violence. The Teach Us Consent website is one significant example of an increasingly digitised approach girls and women are taking to bear witness to rape culture, sexual violence, misogyny, and everyday sexism (Keller et al. 2018). It is part of a feminist ‘paradigm shift’ of ‘provocative and risky’ feminist politics (Baer 2016, 18). It suggests a politics that distances itself from a focus on rights and equality via ‘conventional legal and legislative channels’ (Baer 2016, 18). The Teach Us Consent testimonials follow this path, bypassing police and the court systems, which routinely fail victim-survivors. Instead, testimony is taken to the digital realm as an ‘e-witness’ (Schaffer and Smith 2014). Digital technologies and the emergence and expansion of social media have provided feminists with the opportunity to challenge gender-based violence and rape culture. Essential to much of this activism involves testifying against what is essentially, a rape culture.

Teach Us Consent, Education, and the Context of Australia’s Elite Private School System

Australian researchers, politicians, educators, and cultural commentators have responded to the Teach Us Consent website in many and varied ways. In a 2022 agreement between federal and state and territory education ministers, teaching consent became compulsory in all Australian schools (ACARA 2022, Maunder 2022). Mackinlay et al. (2023, 6) provide a detailed consideration of both this response and work already being carried out in some state jurisdictions, noting that in the latest version of the Australian curriculum (Version 9.0), consent education resides in the Health and Physical Education (HPE) syllabus (ACARA 2022). This is not to say that some jurisdictions have not made significant inroads in the area of consent education. However, it is important to consider the locus in which the Teach Us Consent’s testimonies emerge: Australia’s elite private schools. If we are to consider the importance of having, and not having, power operates in the discourse around sexual consent amongst high school students, then it is important to consider the context these testimonies emerge from.

Whether it meant too or not, Teach Us Consent aims at powerful institutions in Australia, namely, the private (non-government) education sector and specifically elite private (non-government) boys’ schools. In doing so, it also raises questions about the types of gendered and social ideologies they reproduce. In Australia, the private education sector is one of the largest in the world (Perry et al. 2016, 176). It includes both religious and/or independent schools that are considered ‘typologically, geographically, historically, scholastically, and demographically elite’ (Variyan and Wilkinson 2021, 2).2 Three key benefits of the private school system for parents are the class-based privilege they aim to reproduce—in terms of economic, social, and cultural capital; the supposedly high system of discipline administered and values they purport to instil (McDonald et al. 2012, 10; Gottschall et al. 2010). In doing so, there is an associated nurturing of young men and young women as particular types of gendered subjects (e.g., Proctor 2011; Wilson et al. 2015; Variyan and Wilkinson 2021; Charles 2010; Charles and Allan 2022). There is a hegemonic masculinity valorised in private boys’ schools. Gottschall et al.’s research into school marketing texts identify patterns of masculinity including a pronounced focus on leadership and strength, softened by an emphasis on social justice values. Within these texts students are depicted as the ‘ideal’ masculine subject through imagery of athleticism, of a constant doing or moving, emphasising ‘competitiveness, aggressiveness and control’ (23). Older boys are positioned as ‘hard, strong and capable’ (18), and the boys’ schools (and their students) are represented as operating in ‘an idealised masculine space’, one of hyper-masculinity (21). It is important to consider the way masculinity operates within these institutions because of the way they allow gender oppressions to remain unchallenged, invisible, and, in many cases, hidden from public view or categories as the norm (Variyan and Wilkinson 2021).

In comparison, elite girls’ schools have moved along both feminist and neoliberal lines, representing themselves as sites in which young women reach their potential and can join young men as future leaders. These schools draw on neoliberal notions of gender that emphasise the importance of ‘individual effort, responsibility and entrepreneurial spirit’ (Charles 2010, 65), in a version of Angela McRobbie’s ‘top girl’ femininities (2009), where leadership, career aspirations, and personal achievement merge to engage young women in ‘competitive individualism’ (2007, 728). McRobbie argues that ‘top girls’ through a capitalist ‘educational vocabulary’ engage in a ‘sexual contract’ whereby feminism and feminist pedagogy are exchanged for a focus on self-responsibility and hard work. It is a place where economic advancement requires ‘an abandonment of a critique of patriarchy’ (2009, 54). However, it remains a place of complexity. Studies into girls’ conceptions of ‘hyper-sexuality’ show a ‘complex and ambivalent’ status (Charles 2010, 68). That is, while young girls are increasingly incentivised to pursue “sexy” appearances and to perform or simulate their sexuality, such positioning is at odds with a desire to be well-educated and successful (2010, 68). Girls’ schools, then, remain places of a complex and contradictory nature. They are the places where young women’s bodies and minds are required to do and be many things at once. To then layer that ambiguity with demands for them to express clear communication of sexual agreement or not requires these young women to an almost ambidextrous capacity.

Of course, sexual assault is not limited to elite single-sex high schools and while Contos’ original callout was directed to private schools there is no doubt, particularly more recently, that alumni from a variety of school types have responded. If the #MeToo movement has clarified anything it is that gender-based violence is entangled throughout institutions—both public and domestic. Yet, many students who emerge from these schools targetted in Contos’ original callout go on to work in powerful positions within the political, legal, medical, and corporate domains in Australia. It is important to ask questions about the relationship between masculinities, ‘top girl’ femininities produced and reproduced within these schools and issues of consent.

The Teach Us Consent testimonies emerge from a predominantly white, middle-class, privileged, and heterosexual cohort. While that does not invalidate the traumatic nature of these young women’s experiences of sexual violence and harassment, such a focus does risk a “false universalism” about who is affected by gender violence and what that violence looks like. It is not only white women attending private schools who face assault and harassment through a lack of consent. Yet, as Teach Us Consent demonstrates, this is the cohort that is often heard (e.g., Loney-Howes et al. 2021; Mendes et al. 2019; Hush 2020; Serisier 2018). It’s important to consider ‘what relations of power and domination exist between those who incite and those who are asked to speak’ (Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale 1993, 284). Teach Us Consent offers a partial perspective. There is a risk of erasure here, erasure of the experiences of vulnerable, marginalised, and historically silenced women: Indigenous women, women of colour, queer women, and those from different socio-economic backgrounds. This erasure also silences questions about who gets to consent: those who are already vulnerable and marginalised are also less likely to have the tools or engage in public discourse at such a significant level. While partial, this perspective emerging from the Teach Us Consent testimonies, does offer insights into the cultural factors that influence and determine power structures inherent within narratives about breaches of consent.

Rape Culture, Judgement, and a ‘Gendered Grammar of Violence’

Disrupting dominant understandings of who can be perpetrators of rape has long been a goal of feminists’ intent on dismantling rape culture. Kate Harris argues that the word rape has failed to explain the scope or nuance of sexual assault experiences (2011, 52). A specific type of affirmative consent—the ‘yes means yes, no means no’ model—while helpful in some contexts also risks implying that there is a clear dichotomy or distinction between what is, and what is not rape (2011, 52; 2018, 160). However, the online space is not a courtroom and as such not subject to the same constraints, and judgements, as in the criminal justice sector. This section then, considers the ways the testimony in the online context enables, expands, or constrains the reconfiguration of what is permissible when it comes to speaking about rape and consent. As testimonial accounts of sexual violence and harm move into the digital realm a new style of testimony and bearing witness emerges. With that comes questions about the ways in which, how, if at all, they advance the feminist goal of ending rape culture.

Second-wave feminisms of the 1970s gave rise to the term “rape culture”. It is a culture that not only involves the physical act of rape and sexual assault but is also entangled with a multitude of other discursive practices (Keller et al. 2018; Mendes 2015). Hegemonic rape scripts write the story of this culture, governing common beliefs about rape, and what is seen to be a believable or likely assault. Within this culture sexual assault ‘is not only seen as inevitable in some contexts, but desirable and excusable as well’ (Keller et al. 2018, 23). It is a culture where women are represented as being partially responsible or deserving of rape because of their failure to perform ‘chaste femininity, or for sending out signals to men that they are “up for it”’ (23). These signals include staying out late at night, drinking, flirting, clothing style, and previous sexual activity (Mendes 2015, 28; see Chapter 1 of this volume). Language is a key contributor. Along with behaviour, rape culture is a discourse. It is entangled in language emerging from ‘rape jokes, sexual harassment, cat-calling, sexualized “banter”’ (Keller et al. 2018, 24). Essentially rape culture polices women’s bodies; the way they dress, as well as where blame is directed: ‘from the perpetrator in an assault to the victim; and impunity for perpetrators, despite their conduct or crimes’ (24). It is this rape “culture” Leigh Gilmore explains that ‘distorts notions of women’s sexuality, violence against women, and women’s agency… fosters hyperawareness of risk while obscuring the actual conditions in which it typically arises. Either a woman’s body is taken to offer a duplicitous witness in rape culture, or her verbal and nonverbal behaviour is ignored or overridden’ (2017, 134). Inherent within rape culture is the application of judgement, and the lack of what is seen as an authentic or adequate witness.

Rape culture, then, defines what is permissible to speak about, how it is spoken and who is heard. If the Teach Us Consent goal is to demolish that permissibility, then perhaps the contents of its testimonies provide some guidance as to how to redefine what we understand is consent. In her own analysis of online anti-rape activism, criminologist Rachel Loney-Howes (2020) notes that while rape has often been said to be unspeakable, it is more accurate to consider ‘the parameters of permissible speech within the law, the confession and wider society that enforce its (un)speakability’ (2020, p. 62). Considering rape as something unspeakable (and therefore a secret) normalises rules around who is permitted to speak about rape, reinforces the shame of sexual violence, and ensures the criminal justice system enforces its power and permissibility in defining what rape is and is not (61). A “yes means yes” framework can not operate within this unspeakability. Shame encourages silence when powerful structures define what rape (and therefore consent) is and is not. Understanding rape culture feeds into feminist scholars’ argument about rape: that it is about ‘language, interpretation and subjectivity’ (Marcus 1992, 387). Almost thirty years ago Sharon Marcus argued that rape does not occur simply because men are biologically stronger than women. Inherent in the action of rape is the script that is followed, a script that encourages the perpetrator believe that he is superior and empowered (390). Marcus describes this as a ‘gendered grammar of violence’ whereby men are ‘objects of violence and the operators of its tools’, and women as ‘objects of violence and subjects of fear’ (393). A rapist follows the script embedded with notions of conventional masculinity and femininity which uphold gender inequalities. Put simply, says Marcus, a feminist discourse on rape would stop promoting men’s violence against women and instead focus on women’s will and agency (395). Marcus’ work has faced criticism for the way it may infer, once again, that the onus lies on women to prevent rape, by them having to be the ones to change this script: specifically, as in learning to prevent their own rape (Loney-Howes 2020). However, it does provide a lens through which to analyse the ways the Teach Us Consent testimonies. Sarah Banet-Weiser’s work on ‘popular misogyny’ (2018) contextualises this approach further. For Banet-Weiser, popular misogyny ‘is expressed more as a norm, invisible, commonplace’. Girls and women are ‘hyper visible’ because they are so often understood as bodies, says Banet-Weiser (32). Boys and men are not understood in the same way. Rather, for them ‘masculine desire’, while regularly on display is not subject to hyper-visibility because the masculine is marked as the norm. The result, says Banet-Weiser, is that ‘popular misogyny lives in widespread sentiments that “boys will be boys” when they commit sexual violence, and in media representations of heteronormativity’ (32).

Theoretical Approach: Feminist Testimony and e-Witnessing

This chapter is guided by feminist research practices and approaches (Leavy and Harris 2019; Hesse-Biber 2012; Leavy and Hesse-Biber 2007) to better understand the way young women are mediating their experiences of sexual assault. It considers the feminist approach of bearing witness to sexual assault by providing testimony through witness narratives which are increasingly emerging in the digital context. It does so in two ways: first, it analyses the importance of testimony and collective witnessing. The Teach Us Consent website explicitly uses the term ‘testimony’. Second, it considers what happens when these testimonies emerge in the online space. Testimony, when considered in a human rights setting, is associated with matters involving individuals seeking redress and the prosecution of perpetrators. Specifically, it is to ‘build a picture of human rights abuses’, where survivors put forth their accounts to help form a picture of sustained oppression and violence over time (Kelly 2008, 7). Historically, in this context, testimony includes statements about survivors’ own lived experiences, statements from those told about events, or those who have thoughts or impressions of an event (Laub 1992, 75). Simply, testimony is ‘a crucial mode of our relation to events of our time’, examples being the Second World War and the Holocaust (5). Testimony in this context, is sporadic and fragmented. It is not a complete, ‘totalizable’ account, but rather a discursive practice, one which is, rather than a statement, a ‘vow to tell …. To produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth’ (5).

Firstly, witness narratives are essential to testimony. They ‘educate and bind readers’ to real survivors and their stories; there is an understanding that the story ‘is joined to an embodied person’ (Smith and Watson 2012, 590). When witness narratives come together they constitute a ‘collective I-witnessing’, that is, where the “I” often comes to represent ‘a collective injury or suffering’ (2012, 600). Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale term this type of witnessing ‘survivor speech’. It is speech that challenges the conventional speaking arrangements. These are arrangements where ‘women and children are not authoritative, where they are often denied the space to speak or be heard, and where their ability to interpret men’s speech and to speak against men—to contradict or accuse men—has been severely restricted to a few very specific types of cases’ (Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale 1996, 205). Witnessing blurs the tangible with intangible: the collectivising of words and narratives online also collectivises memories and feelings of experiences. Affect scholar Lauren Berlant’s (2008) concept of intimate publics helps to conceptualise this collective “I”-witnessing. What makes a public intimate, says Berlant, is that consumers ‘already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience’ (2008, viii). An intimate public, Berlant says, ‘operates when a market opens up to a bloc of consumers, claiming to circulate texts and things that express those people’s particular core interests and desires’ (2008, 5). This is important when it comes to considering the way consent is communicated. If these testimonies operate, as Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale’s work suggest they may, by challenging the status quo and suggesting that consent is more complex, nuanced, contradictory, and contextual than a simple “yes means yes” narrative, then along with exposing a lack of sexual consent education, these testimonies are also concerned about the lack of complexity within that education. Analysing the Teach Us Consent testimonies from this theoretical viewpoint allows us to consider what the ‘broadly common experience’ (Berlant 2008, viii) of rape and breaches of consent amongst young school students is, and ask the question: how can this common experience inform understandings of consent and its relationship with rape culture?

It is important to note here the way survivor speech is mutating in the digital world. The fluidity of the digital environment shapes new understandings of the kinds of subjectivities emerging in these spaces and their impact on sexual consent discourse. The Teach Us Consent testimonies are fragmented; they are a patchwork of experiences, emotions, and reflections. While they continue the feminist approach of bearing witness to incidents of sexual assault, they do so in an increasingly networked, changing, and interactive environment. Schaffer and Smith suggest this mutation is an ‘e-witnessing’: a collection of story fragments from multiple sources coming together in ‘a witnessing without a singular agent of narration’ (2014, 228). E-witnessing is the fragmented contributions that often highlight a grievance or human rights violation using a mixture of texting, blogs, tweets, and the like. There is a distinctly discursive impact in the digital realm with self-inscription is transformed ‘through identity, relationality, agency and embodiment’ (Smith and Watson 2001, 168).

The sheer number of Teach Us Consent testimonies analysed (3296 of the almost 6700 available at the time) required the application of a feminist mixed methods research process, one which involves large data set analysis via the software data management program, NVivo, and the more finely focused technique of discursive textual analysis via close readings of a random sample of texts.3 Taking this approach paves the way for considering the way these testimonies constitute survivor speech by presuming objects ‘antithetical to the dominant discourse’ (Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale 1993, 268); that is, considering whether these narratives work to oppose, challenge, or rewrite common ‘rape scripts’ or ‘rape myths’ which so often taint survivors’ stories (Loney-Howes 2020; Serisier 2018).4

Rewriting Rape Culture

Anonymous Was a Women5: Exposing the Power and Parameters of the Rape Script

The Teach Us Consent micro-narratives are stories filled with uncertainty, vulnerability, anger, and regret. These are the feelings of rape, a mediation of pain in the online space, and a way of speaking with ‘affective vulnerability, if they speak at all’ (Dobson 2015, 154). There is a ‘biodigital vulnerability’ at play (Fotopoulou 2016, 4): there are limits to this testimony, to the survivors’ ability to ‘speak out’ (Serisier 2018). All the testimonies are anonymous. It is an anonymity which violates what life writing scholar Anna Poletti says is ‘the most basic primary condition of autobiography: that the narrator be identifiable as an individual’ (2020, 80). The very thing that could constitute a weakness—its anonymity—became its strength. Anonymity is the magnet for the testimonies themselves. While a courtroom or a police file would need an identified complainant to be considered authentic, it is the volume and depth of the testimonies in one place that strengthen the website’s articulated goals: to demolish rape culture. Anonymity is what brings the individual to the collective, for, as Smith and Watson would say, ‘the “I” to become a “we”’ (2012, 600). By virtue of her anonymity the survivor articulates a “we” narrative. While her experience is specific to her own body, it resides amongst similar experiences, in similar times and places. This anonymity reveals and reinforces a contradictory wilfulness and vulnerability. This anonymity means identity is limited to pronouns, producing both anonymity and intimacy in that the reader is being directly addressed. The number of testimonies is, at times, overwhelming. Dozens can be read in a relatively short space of time, magnifying the scale and the repetitive nature of sexual assault. There is a repetition in themes, settings, and responses. Throughout the testimonies, the age of the survivor is frequently stated (and often this is someone only 15 or 14 years of age—below the legal age of consent in Australia), alcohol and intoxication are familiar themes, and both parties and private residences are common settings. Demands for oral sex are common, and physical force is often used by the perpetrator.

For the survivor, the after story is almost as important as the moment: it is a field of shame and disgust—with herself, “he”, and others. With the identities anonymised, commonalities emerge in relations; these relations are entangled in complex power structures. The sexual encounter becomes more than a simple yes or no, there are often relationships at play: friends, boyfriends, even recent acquaintances. Power, of course, ‘is a relation’ (Weedon 1997, 110) and the relations identified here are relations not only relations between bodies but relations of power with and between survivors and fellow students, principals, teachers, parents, and educational institutions. It is this power which has failed to allow women’s embodied experiences of pain, to be recognised on an individual level.

He was my first boyfriend, first kiss, first love, first everything. We dated for 9 months and we broke almost a year ago. It wasn’t until after we had broken up and I had a consent talk before our school formal, that I realised I had been sexually assaulted throughout the course of a 9-month long relationship.

***

Our friendship groups were intertwined so I felt it necessary to tell my friends what had happened. At first they all seemed supportive, when in actual fact they didnt believe me and remained close friends with my abuser.

Much like the way feminists long disputed the rape script which enabled husbands to rape their wives without penalty (Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale 1996, 203), the Teach Us Consent testimonies provide the opportunity to trouble the meaning of both romantic and platonic relationships by associating word ‘friend’ or ‘boyfriend’ with phrases like ‘raped me’, ‘sexual assault’, ‘scared’, and ‘pinned to the ground’. The words ‘boyfriend’ and ‘friend’ operate ambiguously here, often meaning two things at the same time. As evidenced by the two examples above, the Teach Us Consent testimonies identify ‘boyfriends’ or ‘friends’ as those who have inflicted pain or reinforced the pain of sexual violence. This is a common refrain throughout the thousands of Teach Us Consent testimonies. The subject ‘friend’ or ‘boyfriend’ conventionally signals an important, reliable, and safe body to be with; a safe relationship. In the Teach Us Consent testimonies ‘friends’ or ‘boyfriends’ are usually people who know each other very well, who may have been linked romantically both before, and continue to have contact after the sexual assault has occurred. There is a sense of trust and love written into subjects who are also the perpetrators’ pain. The friend or boyfriend has been a relation for some time and yet is also a subject with whom the testifier identifies as having a sexually violent or harassing experience with. The friend and boyfriend inhabit two spaces at once. If rape scripts, as Sharon Marcus contends, are ‘scripted interaction[s] which take(s) place in language’ (1992, 391) then a new grammar of sexual violence emerges in the way these words of relations are placed within these micro-narratives. The relationship between survivor and perpetrator, often connected to love and care, has in turn made the sexual encounter that occurred between survivor and perpetrator less clearly defined.

There is an absence of burly strangers jum** out from dark alleyways in these micro-narratives. Reconceptualising the meaning of these words in relation to sexual violence also resists the way fear is operationalised to regulate women’s bodies and the places and spaces in which they can inhabit. That is, they expand the parameters of the scripts within rape culture which suggest that strangers are rapists and rape is rare (Harris 2011, 44; Mendes 2015, 28). These scripts guide and restrict the places women’s bodies are considered safe. That is, not the public place (for it is here these scripts tell women to be fearful) but rather in the private space surrounded by the familiar (and often, under the male gaze). In contrast, fear is juxtaposed with trust, it surrounds words depicting someone trusted, or known; someone who represents safety and care.

Consent: What’s Love Got to Do with It? Everything

The Teach Use Consent testimonies question discourses (prevalent in both legal and mediated settings) that suggest rape only occurs when a victim is attacked or fighting the perpetrator off. They also reject a commonly understood way victims ‘should’ behave when, or after, being raped or sexually assaulted (Loney-Howes 2020, 61; Nicholls 2021; Serisier 2018). This discursive disruption of what caring relationships look like continues into descriptions within the testimonies of liking or loving the perpetrator of sexual violence and breaches of consent. One survivor reflects on her sexual assault in this way: ‘I was still in love with him, and believed he loved me back. I thought that was how love worked’. There is no indication whether the testifier had provided affirmative consent, whether it was either requested or granted. And yet, it indicates, at the very least, some kind of discomfort when it comes to sexual interaction. It also suggests some sort of acquiescence; exactly what kind it is not clearly communicated. Another testimony writer recalls crying while being ‘forced’ into sex and then hugged ‘for being so understanding of his needs’. Being loved (or in the second example hugged), or desiring love and connection are common themes that appear throughout the testimonies.

We never had sex, but when did do sexual things, almost 90% of the time the conversation would go as follows—“I don’t really feel like it can we please cuddle or watch a movie”, and he would say “come on please you know I love you” or “I saved up for you, you promised” or “I need it” something along those lines. basically manipulating me into some form of a yes. He guilt trip** me till I would give in.

Through the testimonies, the perpetrator is someone the survivor trusted or knew, and often someone they did, or still do, have regular contact with. Leigh Gilmore points out women are often denigrated for their actions in circumstances where sexual violence has occurred: case as making ‘wilful choices or even risk-taking behaviour’. This can involve criticisms for knowing the perpetrator, failing to leave when feeling unsafe, and overall ‘seeing victimisation as cooperationg or participation’. As the examples both above and below show ambiguity haunts the discourse of consent. Often silence is interpreted as consent. It is ambiguous and unclear. It is an inability to articulate feelings of fear and guilt. Manipulation is at play, but so is power. The survivor struggles to have her voice heard, her desires acknowledged. Her ability to communicate affirmative consent falters; instead, it is her silence or acquiesce that is interpreted as such.

Ambiguity of Consent

I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no. He knew I was unsure but kept going anyway. I didn’t realise he was the one that did something wrong in the situation. For a year I’ve believed that it was my fault because I should have been more verbal that I was unsure.

***

While we were hiding at some weird rock thing at this place he would put his hand under my bra or under my undies. I kind of just let it happen because I didn’t know what to do or say. I was scared to say no.

The Teach Us Consent testimonies don’t always incorporate spontaneous, traumatic violence according to the dominant parameters of what is acceptable or what is considered an appropriate response when it comes to consent. At times, they reveal encounters the survivor finds embarrassing or shameful. As the above examples show, consent is interpreted somewhere in the silence between yes and no. There is no affirmative consent granted or refused, but neither was it requested. This problematises “yes means yes” and “no means no” mantras, discourses around consent that feminists have long shaped and supported (Harris 2018, 158). In another testimony, a survivor describes being ‘frozen’ as she was being assaulted, but still experiencing an orgasm. The experience left her with feelings of shame and mortification as her physical response did not align with common understandings of what pain and sexual violence looks like. Admitting to orgasm in public, in a legal setting, or in the media, would generate harsh judgements and accusations of mixed messaging, insinuating that the survivor did little to resist the violence and enjoyed it.

As a sports focused school, XXXX in Adelaide had a toxic culture that favoured boys (especially those who played for the school) over girls and their experiences. I was raped by a XXXX when I was in Year 9 at a party on the bathroom floor, unable to move, pinned to the ground, and afterwards was the victim of slut shaming and bullying from the rest of my peers. When I complained to our dean of students he continued the same narrative, citing that what I was alluding to would never of happened because these boys have their whole lives ahead of them and wouldnt do anything that stupid. Alternatively, I was told by the dean to make better life choices.

The issue of relationships re-emerges in the example above (one of many) where the writer’s complaint is relegated to an illusion by those in positions of authority. Here the dean of students, the person charged with student wellbeing, was disbelieving in the story of rape. From the testimony above, it appears as though the survivor’s complaint did not fit an accepted rape script. The comment ‘alluding to’ suggests those in a position of care are subscribing to the norms of ‘popular misogyny’ as outlined by Banet-Weiser (2018). The dean trouble’s the veracity of the survivor’s statement, unable to accept the way it goes against the norms of masculinity because the alleged perpetrator ‘wouldn’t do anything that stupid’. The survivor’s body, however, remains on show, and a body of disbelief. She must ‘make better life choices’. The blame is redirected from the perpetrator on to the victim. The woman’s agency is muffled, the scripts that maintain rape culture operationalised.

There is a temporality at play here too. Generally, these testimonies reveal that the survivor often only recognised that their experience was one of sexual assault sometime after the physical incident has occurred. Rape is a memory that changes over time. Many have either not initially recognised their experience as sexual assault or lack of consent, or have been unable to articulate it as such at the time of the sexual encounter. Unsurprisingly then, many were unable to fit that memory into an accepted rape narrative. Their grammar of violence does not fit the hegemonic rape scripts, but it also doesn’t fit mantras of affirmative consent like “no means no” (Harris 2018).

The Complexities of Consent Communication

The Teach Us Consent testimonies constitute a form of e-witnessing that is very much a collective testimony of what consent education needs to consider and, therefore, the diverse ways it can be communicated. They gesture towards the complexities of communicating the experience of rape—the feelings, the emotion, the physical sensations. This communication, often, does not align within the accepted parameters of hegemonic rape scripts. But neither does it align with affirmative consent “mantras” that rely on clear (usually verbal) communication (Harris 2018). Instead, Teach Us Consent contributes to the growing body of research suggesting that mediated voices speaking out online about their experiences of rape and sexual harm are doing important work in terms of expanding the parameters of permissible speech when it comes to sexual violence. In doing so they are continuing the important, and ongoing feminist project of demolishing rape culture.

The testimonies take words commonly associated with trust and care—friend, boyfriend, and dean (along with parents in many other cases)—and transform them from subjects representing safety and security to something else. In times and places where sexual encounters occur, or have occurred, they exist in positions of power and violence, but also judgement. If we consider the spaces from where these words are produced from—from within institutions where hegemonic masculinities are articulated and the performance of “top girl” femininities encouraged—the communication of consent faces significant challenges. Taking these words and placing them into the online space online allows for the underlying meaning of these words to be contested more widely. Rather than considering what these words should communicate, we can see how they are actually operating in terms of consent communication.

But this is a project that still has a long way to go, and much of that work involves deep thinking about the nuances of consent communication. The testimonies reveal that there are significant complexities and ambiguities inherent in scenarios involving where consent is required. An enthusiastic “yes” or “yes means yes” is a relatively simple response to a complex problem. Failures of consent communication are more than just a simple misunderstanding (Harris 2018, 171). As Harris says, communication is ‘by nature, difficult, fraught, exciting, complex, curious and rewarding. In the midst of that complexity, humans still, overwhelmingly, make moral decisions’ (171). Perhaps then, considering these challenges it is important to engage with the ethical and moral side of communication, as much as we engage with the messaging.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Several ideas in this chapter emerged as part of a team collaboration. Many thanks must go to Professor Liz Mackinlay, Assoc. Professor Margaret Henderson, Dr. Christina Gowlett, and Dr. Bonnie Evans for your expertise and commitment to work in this space. Thanks also to the team at Teach Us Consent.

  2. 2.

    State education departments regulate both public and private school; however, private schools have relatively more independence in their affairs. They charge private tuition fees on top of the government funding they receive (Australian Government 2021; Lye and Hirschberg 2017). See also Ore, Adeshola (2022) The Guardian Private school funding in Australia has increased at five times rate of public schools, analysis shows | Australian education | The Guardian; Karl, Paul (2021) The Guardian Australian government funding for private schools still growing faster than for public | Australian education | The Guardian. Also see Save Our Schools SOS Australia—Fighting for Equity in Education (saveourschools.com.au).

  3. 3.

    Following Loney-Howes work, this chapter applies a feminist poststructuralist lens to understandings of discourse and power, where ‘to speak is to assume a subject position within discourse and to become subjected to the power and regulation of the discourse’ (Weedon 1997, 116). In doing so it also understands that ‘patriarchy implies a fundamental organisation of power on the basis of biological sex, an organisation which, from a poststructuralist perspective, is not natural and inevitable, but socially produced’ (123).

  4. 4.

    The use of social media as a form of feminist activism requires specific tools of analysis to manage the large quantities of rich and potentially ephemeral data, and research into sexual violence, and especially when this is in a digital media context, requires us to consider particular sensitivities as well as the potential for absences to be ignored. Following the work of digital communications scholar Aristea Fotopoulou allows researchers to remember that digital feminist activism and, in our case these testimonies of trauma, engage in a type of ‘biodigital vulnerability’. That is, these are ‘contradictory spaces of both vulnerability and empowerment’ (2016, 4). Nvivo’s autocoding facility has the capacity to sort and code data into themes without the intervention of the researcher. Nvivo’s autocoding facility sorted the Teach Us Consent data into 15 themes (through a word text search) under the following headings: assault, boys, consent, education, friends, girls, party, private, school, sex, sexual, sexual assault, thing, times, and year. These autocode results were then used as a starting point to direct a keyword search to thematically code the data. Nvivo has a group of “stop words”: these are words that it does not pick up on to avoid significant duplication. These include gender pronouns (such as he, she, him, her and so on). Adjusting these stop words to include, rather than exclude, these words confirms that most respondents to Contos’s original question: ‘have you ever been sexually assaulted by someone who went to an all-boys school?’ were women. Moreover, most of these testimonies related to heterosexual interactions and that males were by far the alleged perpetrators. Unlike other online platforms such as twitter or media like SMS (Short Message Service), there is ostensibly no limit to the length of testimony that can be uploaded on to the Teach Us Consent website. While there were some lengthy narratives of more than 4500 words, the average word length of the testimonies was 156. The testimonies that form the basis for analysis were imported using a webscra** tool, which gave us the capacity to download 3296 of the approximately 6700 that were stated to be on the website at the time of study.

  5. 5.

    Virginia Woolf famously said that for most of history, anonymous was a woman.