Traumatized Subjectivity and Consent: Addressing the Needs of Vulnerable Youth in Sexuality Education to Help End Gender-Based Violence

• In Event: 63.017 - The Canadian Committee of Graduate Students in Education Research Symposium

Abstract

Sexual consent education has come to be considered a foremost solution to addressing an epidemic of gender-based violence (Schneider & Hirsch 2018), where 1 in 3 women will experience some form of sexual assault in her life, and only 3 of 1000 sexual assaults result in a conviction (Government of Ontario 2015). Yet, as this presentation will demonstrate, mainstream conceptions of the autonomous sexual actor (Friedman 1997) and “healthy” sexual consent often involve the demand to be profoundly self-knowing, rational, and unfettered by heightened physical or emotional responses during sexual encounters. These expectations can be both unrealistic and damning, particularly for marginalized youth who are experiencing the subjective impacts of trauma. This presentation will point to an urgent need to augment policy and programming to include a trauma-informed conception of consent. I argue that the current gap increases the vulnerability of some of the most marginalized students.
The purpose of this presentation is to share findings from my doctoral research that contrasts the conceptualization of the newly added topic of consent within Ontario’s 2015-revised sexuality education curriculum (Ontario Ministry of Education 2015a; 2015b) with qualitative data about trauma survivors’ lived experiences and understandings of consent. I will draw from an interdisciplinary theoretical framework informed primarily by critical sexuality education studies (Beres 2014; Gilbert 2018), critical trauma studies (Herman 2015; Casper & Wertheimer 2016), and research on gender-based violence (Brison 2003; Carmody 2005).
The findings emerged from a qualitative research project that included nine one-on-one, open-ended interviews with University of Toronto students, aged 18-22, who went to high school in Ontario and self-identified as survivors of trauma. All of the participants were first generation Canadians, and most were racialized, LGBTQ, and had disabilities and/or mental health issues. Trauma was broadly defined in the study and participants had a variety of traumatic histories; however, they were all survivors of sexual violence—youth with histories of trauma are more than twice as likely to be re-victimized by sexual violence (Statistics Canada 2017).
Participants shared their perspectives on consent and it was clear that, in the current socio-political landscape, dominant conceptualizations of consent often do not reflect the lived experiences of survivors of trauma. What is missing is an understanding of the complexity of navigating consent in a sexual terrain rife with violence, and further, how living with the psychosocial impacts of trauma presents its own set of challenges. This presentation will share some of these specific challenges and some findings for what may be helpful in building more ethical, trauma-informed praxis for consent education.
The reliance on consent education (campaigns, curricula, community programs) to address sexual violence has proliferated in recent years. My work represents a timely critique of a major gap in these initiatives. This presentation is also relevant to the current political climate in Ontario where consent education has been removed via a controversial repeal of the 2015 curriculum by the provincial government. As my work illuminates, the 2015 curriculum was not trauma-informed; however, to remove any consent education is extremely troubling.

Author

• Jessica Wright, University of Toronto - OISE