I am a firm believer that consent education starting from a young age could directly lessen the amounts of rapes and sexual assaults.
We teach people not to rape. At least we say we do… We say “don’t rape” and then the media tells them that a rapist is a scary man jumping from the bushes.
We don’t teach people to get consent. That consent isn’t the absence of a no but the presence of an enthusiastic and informed yes.
You can ask someone if they raped someone and they’ll say no. But ask them if they got consent? They also will say no.
And it’s the same damn thing.
So, being the parent of a youngish kid, I think about this a lot.
His natural tendency is to completely override my boundaries. I started working on this by not letting him twiddle the other damn nipple while he was nursing. People who’ve breastfed know what I mean here. This is normal baby behavior across mammalian species–they root, kneed, pound, pinch, twiddle, twist and we put up with it for a while because it helps the feeding go faster and then when it hits a certain point, it’s too much and tigers actually start cuffing their young away from the tit because they are So Done with the damn claws.
Being a human who doesn’t like hitting, I put barriers in the way that made it very hard for him to do that, but eventually we had to have Talks about Bodily Autonomy. It took a while for him to stop, but he did, eventually stop.
Now, the lesson comes from tickling. I don’t just grab him and tickle him. I say, “Can I tickle you?”
And he will say, “Yes!” and then I tickle him and when he says “Stop!” I stop right away because this IS NOT about tickling him, it’s about teaching him that he has control over what happens to his body and that people will stop when he sets limits. And if he says, “No!” I say, “Okay.”
And sometimes he says stop, and then a few minutes later he says, “Tickle me now!”
We’re working on interrupting, too, because that’s super duper important to being respectful. He is learning to put a hand on my forearm when he wants to get a word in (at my request) rather than speaking over or demanding my attention when I’m in the middle of talking to someone else. Hand on my arm means that as soon as I find a natural pause in the conversation, I’ll say, “Okay, kiddo, your turn, what’s up?”
It’s just a process, one step at a time, tackling each part of it. The goal is to raise a child who feels 100% comfortable setting boundaries about their own body, without overrunning other people’s. He’s five, so we’re not talking about much in the way of complex dynamics like dating or whatnot, but he’s starting to ask questions about babies and he gets the answers he needs to the questions he asks. (I don’t have to explain sex to a five year old to answer the question, “Did I come out your mouth when I lived in your tummy?” I figure I’ve got a year before he does what my eldest did and says, “I know how the baby grows in the tummy and the umbilical cord and placenta and how it gets born and all that, but how does it get IN there?”
This is all sex and consent ed. It started when he was a year and a half old, stopping him from pinching my damn nipples (most babies try to do this as soon as they have the motor coordination to do so). And stopping him from sticking his hand down my shirt when he was 4 and no longer nursing. And walking away when he tried to hit me, and insisting that he knock on the frigging bathroom door rather than bursting in like the goddamn Kool Aid man when I’m shitting. (I have less hope on this one, my 12 year old still does it.)
It’s not letting it slide if he spouts up that boys are better than girls because some wee little asshole said so in kindergarten. (Seriously, I question wtf they are being taught at home.) It’s teaching him that if he sees injustice, it’s important to speak up.
And it’s NOT easy. Five year olds are walking entitlement sponges. Like, no, kid, you don’t get literally everything just because you want it. That’s not how any of this works. But you can see things start to sink in, because I think people want to feel like they’re doing the right thing, and so yeah, he is paying attention.
And I’m trying to set up a dynamic where he feels safe telling me anything. You know how parents talk about getting one word answers about how school was? I get BOOKS worth of narrative from this kid.
It is not fast, it is not instant, and it requires daily work on the ideas of bodily autonomy. And the first step in teaching him about consent is teaching him how it feels to have control over what happens to his body. One day he lets me tickle him, another day he doesn’t, and I don’t make a stink or try to persuade him either way. It’s amazing… kids actually like being tickled if they have CONTROL. Violate that control once, and you’re done forever.
“how to be a mommy, by @Jenroses” is a book I would recommend once Jenrose gets around to writing it. :)