Elsie Whittington: Consent Education

This week I chatted with Elsie Whittington about consent education. We've both been working on this a lot recently so it was a mutual chat rather than an interview. We chatted about how consent should be embedded rather than being a discrete subject. The problems with binary and legalistic models of consent. How continuums and spectrums can open up the topic and allow for people to understand how it might work in real life scenarios. The importance of embodiment and agency and how structures (schools, unis, workplaces) can make consent harder. Elsie is a lecturer and youth worker at the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University. She is one of the leading voices in consent education as part of sexuality and relationship education for young people. Her excellent paper Rethinking consent with continuums: sex, ethics and young people, is published in the journal Sex Education by Routledge. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14681811.2020.1840343 My book, Can We Talk About Consent? A book about freedom, choices, and agreement. Written for young adults, it aims to go beyond basic, binary and legalistic notions of consent and expands the definition to talk about agency, power, choices, social scripts, collective agency, solidarity, privilege and empowerment. Lots of practical advice about how to put consent into practice using everyday examples. https://www.bishuk.com/can-we-talk-about-consent/ To hear the full show, sign up to patreon.com/culturesexrelationships from just $1 a month.