Consent

Institutional definitions relate consent to permission, acquiescence, common approval and the deliberate, conscious and free agreement to take part in a given act. With respect to violence against women, however, it is necessary to broaden the definition to include a reflection on what consent is not, since women’s silence or lack of clear expression of will in a violent situation has often served as a basis for exonerating the person or persons who committed the assault. To the lexicographical definitions of the term, therefore, we add the need, when speaking of consent, to consider it as the act of setting personal and interpersonal boundaries, and also respecting those of others. Boundaries provide the temporal and contextual framework that stipulates, in that place and time, what is or is not consensual. The UN stresses the need to promote a culture of consent in order to end rape culture.