Today’s episode is the second part of a 2-part series on Teenagers, Rape Culture, Sexual Assault and Consent. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 - Episode 24, I recommend that you stop here and go back and listen and then come back and listen to this Episode 25.

If these topics are too upsetting for you, of course, you don’t have to listen. But this is your teenager we’re talking about – you decide.

Hi, if you’re new here, I’m Ann Coleman and this is Speaking of Teens. I’m here every Tuesday with a new episode sharing science-based insight into parenting your teen or tween. My teenage son went through a couple of really difficult years, and I really fumbled things. After our family got on track, I decided to learn everything I could about the science of parenting adolescents so I could help you learn what I really wish I’d known.

I’ve never done this right up front before, but today, I want to ask you, if you will, to please share the podcast on your social media or with a couple of friends you think might appreciate it. I hope you agree that what I’m putting out is important and useful and I just want to make sure as many moms as possible have an opportunity to benefit from it. Thanks!

So, last week, we talked about “rape culture” and how our patriarchal society’s misogyny has led to deeply ingrained biases about sexual assault and real rape, how the onus is always on the female to protect herself, how men and boys (on a whole) have been led into this masculinity trap of sexual entitlement, how there’s this bros versus hos narrative that’s so pervasive that it’s even clouded girls’ judgment to the point of just accepting sexual harassment and assault as part of life.

I do want to make it clear that this isn’t about male bashing. I have a 21-year-old son and I know they’re as much a victim of our society – our culture - as our girls are. And I don’t believe that just because someone says something means we must accept it as fact.  We should never suspend reality, ignore facts, or dispense with due process. False accusations can be every bit as traumatic and life-altering as being the victim of harassment, assault, or rape. There should always be a thorough investigation when an accusation is made. But the fact remains; it’s mostly girls and members of the LGBTQA+ community who are being harassed, assaulted, and raped at alarmingly high rates – mostly by boys.

Today, I want dig more deeply into what’s going on with our teens and tweens in middle and high school; what exactly are we dealing with? What are their attitudes and behaviors about sex and sexual harassment and how do we talk to them about that and about sexual consent?

Let’s start by taking a closer look at our kids’ experiences with sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape at middle and high schools across the US (and I’m willing to bet, if you’re in Australia, the UK, Canada, South Africa, Germany – wherever you are, I’d be willing to bet the statistics are very similar). As I said in episode 24 last week, “rape culture” is part of the overall school culture if you ask most teen or tween girls. It’s just part of being a girl at school. They learn to ignore it, maneuver around it, laugh it off or sometimes even consider it flirting or part of being courted. Occasionally, they report it.

In 2011, the American Association of University Women (the AAUW) published its Crossing the Line report on sexual harassment in middle and high schools. The organization surveyed approximately 2,000 students across the country in grades 7 through 12 in May and June of 2011. The results were not surprising: 48% of the surveyed students (boys and girls) had to walk the hallways, sit in class, eat lunch and wait for the bus all while they endured sexual harassment. And 87% of those students said it had impacted them negatively. I’ll link to this report and all the others I mention, in the show notes so you can read the details but allow me to paint the picture: Most of this harassment is verbal; comments and name calling: Ho, bitch, slut…being told they’re hot, telling them nasty jokes, making Michael Jackson gestures (you know what I’m talking about), being asked to bend over or shake it or whatever the latest thing is. And of course, there’s physical harassment as well – some of it we discussed last week; blocking someone’s way, cornering them…And, of course, there’s also electronic or digital harassment, which affected around a third of the students.

As expected, girls were harassed both in person and digitally more than boys - by a significant margin; 56 and 52% to 40 and 35%. About a third of girls and a quarter of boys also witnessed sexual harassment at school – they were bystanders. Of those who were harassed (remember they’re answering an anonymous survey here), only 12% of the girls and 5% of the boys reported it to a school official – others told family or friends but around half told no one about it. That should tell you how little faith they have that their report would matter or that there would be no retaliation for making that report.

Now those statistics are from 11 years ago, but I also pulled the US Civil Rights Data Collection Report for sexual violence in kindergarten through 12th grade (from almost all public schools in the US). This most recent report came out in October 2020 and compares data from the 2015-16 school year to data from the 2017-18 school year – it covers allegations of sexual violence, including sexual assaults, rapes, and attempted rapes (again, these are not confirmed incidents – they’re allegations). This report is compiled by the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (the OCR) and what it shows is stunning to say the least. Between the 2015-16 school year and the 2017-18 school year, there was an increase of 55% in total alleged incidents of rape, attempted rape, and sexual assault. 55%! This report also states that the OCR received almost 15 times as many sexual harassment complaints in 2019 than they did in 2009. 15 times as many reports in a span of 10 years. Now, remember what we just said about kids actually reporting what’s going on at school. Back in 2010-2011, the AAUW said that 12% of girls and 5% of boys had reported sexual harassment to school officials. So, it does appear at least that over the past few years our girls and members of the LGBTQA+ community have begun to feel more empowered to report. And we can probably account for this with the #metoo movement beginning in the fall of 2017,

Whatever the reason for the increase in reported incidents, 8 months before these alarming statistics were ever printed in the report, they prompted the announcement of a Title IX enforcement initiative by the US secretary of Education in February of 2020 – in other words, they were like, this shit’s getting serious, and we’ve got to do something about it. By May of that year, they had passed a Final Rule. In case you don’t know, Title IX is actually Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972  - it’s a federal law and it applies to all students from kindergarten on through college and postgraduate school. It states that No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. So, this is the federal law that applies to all public institutions – it’s the law that is in the news so much.

And because of this huge increase in sexual misconduct complaints, including sexual harassment – Title IX’s protections against sexual harassment, have now been strengthened by issuing what is called a “Final Rule”. A Final Rule essentially adds binding legal obligations to the law where previously the OCR had just issued what is called “guidance” regarding sexual harassment – guidance is when government agencies say, “we think the law means this and this is the way we think it should be interpreted” but then federal courts actually have the final say. But with a Final Rule it’s no longer just guidance it's the actual law.

So, generally, this new Title IX Final Rule requires schools to respond properly and investigate every formal complaint of sexual harassment, to notify parents, and allow bystanders to make reports of discrimination and harassment. It also requires schools to properly train someone on staff in Title IX and furnish support to the victim of harassment.

But even with all this hoopla from the OCR and the new Title IX Final Rule, it still seems to many students that schools are still not doing enough to quell the sexually violent atmosphere in school and to hold certain students accountable – and they’re speaking out…like so many other people in the US and across the world have done about many different types of racial and social injustices over the past couple of years. During the 2021-2022 school year students took their complaints public in states across the US - Ohio, Florida, Texas, Maine - picketing and holding protests in school auditoriums, online, during school board meetings and on school lawns. So, has the Title IX Final Rule made any difference in how the adults at your child’s school deal with this harassment – or is the attitude still as it’s always been?

Back in 2017, the authors of a report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education conducted an in-depth survey of students and also spoke with both parents and teachers about sexual harassment in schools at different workshops and classes across the country. They asked teachers how they would handle the situation, if they overheard boys making misogynistic or sexually degrading comments about girls at school. They painted a picture of the boys talking about girls and saying things like, “I’d hit that” or “those two are total sluts” – something similar. And time and time again, many of the adults – teachers or administrators - said they wouldn’t say anything. Their reason was usually that they knew it wouldn’t make a bit of difference in the boy’s behavior. Many adults said they would say something, but they didn’t know what. The prevailing attitude was, “What are you gonna’ do?”, “Boys will be boys”.

This same Harvard report quotes a 16-year-old female student as saying, “One thing that I think all girls go through at some age is the realization that their body, seemingly, is not entirely for themselves anymore…the unfortunate thing is that we all just sort of accept it as a fact of life.”

In the survey results they show the vast majority of the students they questioned (some from high school and college) said their parents had never talked to them about sexual harassment, how to not do it, how to avoid being a victim of it, about not catcalling women or calling them bitches and ho’s…none of it. The comments and survey results also clearly show that young people don’t step in and say anything when someone is harassed either – for several reasons; a) because they know it won’t change anything, b) if they’re a girl, they say they’d just be considered a bitch, c) they just see it as just normal kidding around.

So, this is the environment in which our teens are attempting to build real relationships with each other - to navigate sexual consent. How can they possibly be expected to switch off these attitudes and deeply ingrained societal norms when they actually become sexual with someone or enter into a sexual relationship? If we’re not talking to them about these things – adults are not correcting what they’ve learned through osmosis – how are they figuring out how to treat each other any differently when they become intimate? Short answer? They’re not.

This same Harvard report found that somewhere around 50 – 60% of the older adolescents (18-25-year-olds) they surveyed said they’d never had a conversation with their parents about

• making sure their partner wants to have sex before having sex.
• making sure they’re comfortable having sex before having sex
• not pressuring someone into having sex with you or hounding someone into having sex with you after they’ve said no
• not having sex with someone when their drunk or impaired in some way
• being a caring and respectful sexual partner

About a third of those surveyed had never talked with their parents about any of this stuff but most of them who actually did talk to their parents about some of these things said they’d at least had some influence on them. So maybe it’s not surprising that the survey also showed that close to all the students surveyed (male and female), either agreed with or were neutral to the statement, “women are turned on/find it sexy when men get a little rough with them”. And maybe most telling, and I’ll quote the report here, “Some respondents suggested that the sum of their sexual morality, of their understanding of care and ethics in sexual relationships, is simply “don’t rape.” As one young man told us: “I think most of my friends and me in middle school and high school didn’t have any idea what sexual harassment or assault was. We just thought assault was some messed up guy pulling a woman into a dark alley and raping her. That was all we knew we couldn’t do.”

So, it’s obvious, we have some work to do here as parents – we’ve got to spend some time teaching our teens how to treat each other to somehow combat the effects of living in this “rape culture”. The vast majority of kids surveyed said they’d never had a discussion with their parents about misogyny or sexual harassment – so let’s make sure you kid’s in the minority here.

The Harvard report I’ve been referring to – from their Graduate School of Education - goes on in the Appendix to give some great suggestions for talking to teenager about sexual harassment. Because, as the authors point out, it’s critical that these discussions go beyond general platitudes like “always be respectful”. (Again, the link will be in the show notes but I’m going to expand on what they’ve said here).

First, of course, our kids need to understand exactly what sexual harassment and misogyny are. Clearly defining this for them is a great start. I know how hard it can be to talk about anything related to sex and get your kid to be serious about it, so always make it clear that this is a serious topic right off the bat – they’ll get it. There should be ample opportunities to bring these topics up considering our culture. As I’ll mention again later, using song lyrics, movies, TV shows, pop culture in general as a jumping off point for the conversation should be pretty easy. Ask them what they think of the lyrics or what someone said to another person in the movie. Ask if they know that using those words (“bitch” or “ho”) are words of contempt for women and are degrading. Make it clear if you have a girl that girls calling each other these names also just make it easier for boys to do it and feel okay about it.

Ask if they’ve ever thought about what sexual harassment means and see if they can describe it or as about something in the news or even something you’ve witnessed in person together. Make it clear that sexual harassment is anything someone does or says to another person that is considered “unwelcome” and has anything to do with that person’s sex, gender, sexual orientation…name calling, lewd comments, bullying-type behavior, sexual advances – anything that makes the person on the receiving end feel uncomfortable. Ask whether it’s ever happened to them or if they’ve ever done it to someone else or witnessed it. Talk about all the feelings involved, the possible motivation and thought processes behind the person doing it and the victim.

When you are around a group of teens and hear something misogynistic or degrading to women or the LGBTQA+ community say something. I’ve been known to stop my vehicle on the side of the road to have conversations like these with boys calling each other “gay” as a derogatory term. If we’re witness to this kind of behavior and don’t step in and say something, we might as well be saying those things ourselves. Let kids know that sexist comments and racist comments are in the same category – that following up with “just joking” means nothing. Try to have them put themselves in the other person’s shoes – try to get them to feel empathy for other human beings – ask them how they would feel if suddenly people with their eye color were considered “less than” and everyone around them was making fun of them or “just joking” about them.

Talk to them about what it means to be an honorable person, to treat people with dignity and to courageous about standing up for other people. Let them know there’s no honor in jumping on the band wagon to “slut shame” or shun someone because of their sexual orientation or gender.  Talk about what they can do if they see it happening.

Talk to them about Title IX and let them know they should report these things if they see them or if it’s happening to them. Tell them to come and talk to you and you’ll help them figure it out. Take any opportunity you have to discuss these things with your kids. The younger the better. Keep the conversation going. Things will never change until we change the attitudes of the youngest generations.

Now how does all this interact with consent? These attitudes, sexual harassment, what girls have grown accustomed to and what boys attitudes are about sex (and girls in general) have everything to do with consent. If a boy considered a girl “less than”, just an object of fantasy or a bitch or a ho or a slut…how much consideration do you think he’ll give her when it comes to engaging in sex? How kind and gentle will he be? How considerate of her wishes or comfort? Will he look for signs of distress? Will he ask permission before just going for it? And what about our girls? How do they feel about themselves? Do they feel like their role is to be beautiful, sexy, and wanted? Are they going allow someone to intimidate or coerce them into doing something they don’t want to do? Are they going to keep their mouth shut out of embarrassment or fear they’ll be prude shamed or lied about?

Consent is inextricably tied to these attitudes about sex, gender, misogynistic views, and harassment. These attitudes cause people to push consent aside. And when there is no consent, there is assault. THAT we need to make perfectly clear to our boys and our girls.

So, let’s talk about this issue of consent. This is what we’ve been working towards this whole time.

First, let’s discuss it in terms of the law – legal consent. There’s no one single legal definition of consent – no definition at the federal level that applies to all states. Each states has its own laws which define sex crimes like rape, assault, and abuse. There will be a statute, or a written law and then appellate court cases will have likely further defined those written laws.

Generally, there are 3 elements of consent that are addressed in these various laws – how they’re defined and the parameters and different degrees of offenses will vary wildly from state to state:

• Affirmation – did the person agree in words or action that they consented?
• Capacity – were they old enough to give consent, did they have the mental/cognitive ability to give consent, were they under the influence, were they unconscious or asleep?
• Whether it was freely given – someone who is coerced by violence or threat of harm or were lied to or defrauded in some way

I’ll have a link in the show notes where you can look at your state’s laws if you’re in the US.

Now, you’ve watched enough Law and Order type shows to know that nothing is ever just cut and dried in a court case. Consent, like other elements of the crime of rape or sexual assault (and all the different degrees of each crime) must be interpreted by the jury based on the evidence presented in court – witness testimony, physical evidence… Then if that case is appealed by the defendant, you may have an appellate court fine tune that state’s law based on what they decide.

And while you don’t want your teenager to ever cross the line into committing a crime, if they will simply focus on the elements of consent “in real life” that we’re going to discuss, and as long as the age of each of the people involved doesn’t violate the law, they should be okay as far as the law goes. Our non-legal definitions of consent are going to be less specific than a state law, but it always boils down to those same things: freely given consent by someone with the capacity to consent. Consent is always central to whether a sexual act is okay or not okay. The CDC defines sexual violence as any “sexual activity when consent in not obtained or not freely given.” RAINN or the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network defines sexual assault as any sexual behavior that happens without explicit consent. This could be rape, attempted rape, fondling or any type of unwanted sexual touching, forcing someone to perform sexual acts such as oral sex or penetrating the perpetrators body. So, rape is a form of sexual assault, but sexual assault does not always mean rape. I think just having an understanding of these words and definitions will be helpful in any discussions with your child about consent.

And to give you a little more confidence, I want to recommend a great book by Shafia Zaloom – you may have seen it, it’s called Sex, Teens, and Everything in Between. If you can get your kid to read it, all the better. (of course, I’ll link to it in the show notes). She goes into extreme detail about situations our teens find themselves in and gives great examples of every step of consent. So, if you want to dig into it, this is your book.

Obviously, if you’ve made it this far in the episode, you understand that no matter how much we talk to our kids about the advantages of putting off having sex until they’re in a mature and loving relationship…maybe even marriage…that just may not happen. Not that everyone is having sex in high school. As a matter of fact, the latest statistics from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey for 2019 says roughly 38% of high school students have had sex and those numbers are way down from 2009. So, not everyone is having sex. And another thing you should know is that it’s a complete myth that all high school students are “hooking up” and having random meaningless sex all the time. Only about 27% of 18–19-year-olds – male and female – have had more than one sex partner. The problem is that even our kids think everyone is hooking up all the time. And that presents its own issues. If they think everyone else is doing it, it makes them feel left out, that they’re not cool and that they’re missing out on something, which can cause them to jump into sex with someone even when they’d rather not. So, keep in mind as we’re talking about consent, that explaining to them that people are not just randomly hooking up all the time, is probably a good idea.

Alright, so let’s dig in to what your kids need to know about consent. Zaloom (who is an expert in educating teens about sex) points out in her book, (the one I just mentioned) Sex, Teens and Everything in Between - that for our teens to be able to understand consent we need to make a solid connection between regular old everyday consent about mundane things and sexual consent. The example she uses in her teaching is French fries. She asks students how they feel when they’re sitting at lunch with a plate full of yummy French fries and everyone around them starts grabbing fries off their plate without asking. She explains this is an issue of consent – that people are assuming that they can take your fries before they’ve even asked. They’ve not asked for consent, and you’ve not given it. So, they shouldn’t be taking your fries.

Consent is all about acknowledging that you can’t do something without first asking for permission and respecting the answer you get. For example, asking someone’s permission before sharing a picture of them online or asking permission to borrow your sister’s top or asking someone if they want to play a video game or if they want to watch a movie and respecting the answer they give.

I think it’s just been in the past few years that parents have begun to have very different conversations about touching and consent with their children and other family members – about things that never crossed my mind when my son was little. I discussed inappropriate touching and explained that no one should touch him in his private areas, but I never told him he didn’t have to hug his grandmother if he didn’t want to. But these are such wise conversations to have with the tiniest of children. To teach them that their body is there’s and there’s only and that no one has a right to touch them in any way whatsoever if they don’t want to. So, no more of this – “go give Uncle John a big hug” or “give grandma a big kiss” if they don’t want to. It’s learning about setting boundaries for themselves and respecting other people’s boundaries. And that’s essentially what consent in any context is all about. Making consent a part of everyday conversation about everyday things will help them keep this central in their mind in other contexts – like sex – we hope. Our kids and our teens need to understand that having boundaries – about anything and everything - is not only not rude but that asking for consent and being asked for consent should be expected.

Now, when we talk about consent in a sexual context, we’re going to have to get pretty detailed with our kids because of the current attitudes we know they have. The basic guidelines are pretty simple – but it’s the nuances of a particular situation that can make it complicated or muddy the waters and we want to make sure there are no muddy waters around consent.

In a nutshell, consent must be, as Zaloom puts it in her book, “affirmative, conscious, voluntary, and ongoing. It can be revoked at any time. Silence or lack of protest is not consent. People can’t give their consent if they’re sleeping, unconscious, impaired, or under the influence of drugs or alcohol.”

Now, she adds that people can’t legally give consent if they’re under 18 and their partner is over 18, but that’s a tad misleading. There are states in which a person can be 14 and the partner 17 and it’s a crime. So, just know you’re state’s law like we talked about a minute ago.

Now, before we break down all the elements of consent and get into each element, let me tell you, there’s a very entertaining video on YouTube that does an excellent job at explaining consent in a very tongue in cheek way that may be a great conversation starter with your teen. It’s called “Tea” as in the kind you drink – it’s actually just a doodle cartoon video that uses drinking tea as a euphemism for having sex. I think it was initially done in Britain – hence, tea, but it’s been adapted many different ways by different people. I watched several and the two I’m linking to in the show notes are my favorites – both by the same people but one is the “clean” version and one I laughed my ass off at. So, the clean version is of course more appropriate for your teenager I suppose. But anyway, it truly sums up the entire definition of consent in a very entertaining way. You could even use it as a teaching guide, stopping the video after each segment to discuss what it means. I’ll give you more tips about actually having the conversation in a few minutes.

Let’s talk about the elements of consent. Consent is all about communication so our kids need to know how to clearly ask and clearly answer so there can be no misunderstandings during a sexual encounter. So, the first thing is that consent should always be an enthusiastic YES! Years ago, “no means no” was actually the battle cry of the anti-rape movement. Meaning, once someone says no, anything that happens after that is not consensual and should be considered rape. But that didn’t work too well. It’s too easy to assume everything’s great unless someone’s screaming no.

Women realized that you know what, that puts all the responsibility on the person on the receiving end and doesn’t always work anyway. Alternatively, for consent, there should be an enthusiastic yes. In the words of Megan Garber of The Atlantic, “It is active affirmation, rather than passive acquiescence that feminists have fought for.” That’s because, no, to many men, just means, “I’m just saying that because I don’t want you to think I’m too easy” or “I’m going to need a few minutes” or “persuade me a little more”. They’ve gotten this idea over the years through popular media, movies, TV and music and also through a few studies done decades ago showing a large minority of college age girls said they sometimes said no even though they had “every intention to and were willing to engage in sexual intercourse”.

So, over the years, men have used this argument, that no, really can mean yes as well as no, to defend themselves from rape charges. “I was confused – I thought she meant yes” And very often, even after hearing the word “no”, and going on to complete the act of intercourse, they will be acquitted.

Teens – boys and girls both, should understand then, that they need to expressly hear or say yes to whatever sexual activity they’re engaging in. And the enthusiastic part is just as important. Adding in enthusiastic is meant to stress that if someone feels somehow pressured to do it or isn’t really into it or would rather not but they’ve just acquiesced – that’s not true consent. You don’t want to get or give an “okay if you want to” or an “I guess”, you want to get or give an enthusiastic, without a doubt, “yes, I want to do this thing we’re about to do.”

So, because consent requires an enthusiastic yes, just because someone a) dresses a certain way, flirts, acts in a provocative manner – even if they take off all their clothes and parade around the room – that’s not an enthusiastic yes – that’s not an invitation for sex. And b) just because one person initiates a sexual act and the other person doesn’t put up a fuss, protest, say no, pull away or stays quiet, does not mean they consent. In other words, the lack of a no is not an enthusiastic yes. And this is so important for them to understand, because when you’re young you may not be paying much attention to all the other non-verbal cues that could be going on.

Getting carried away in the heat of the moment and thinking nothing about the other person can easily lead one to believe everything’s fine. But the other person could be extremely uncomfortable, afraid or even re-traumatized and may not say a word even though they don’t consent. So, getting that yes is important.

Which leads me to the next point. A lot of people feel that you should be able to use nonverbal cues during sex to give consent, and some people agree with that but there can be so much confusion in the beginning for young people that the best course of action is to talk. Of course, constantly having to say, “can I touch you here?”, “can I do this now?” and the other person needing to say yes, yes, yes might come off as feeling a little robotic or could be a bit of a mood killer. So, in Zaloom’s book, she has a great suggestion that some of the teens in one of her classes came up with: “you good?” to which the answer, “yes “or “uh huh” is pretty easy. Put your hand here – you good? Start to do something else – you good? Now, let’s remember this because the next thing we want to talk about is that consent is specific to each encounter and each act.

Specific consent means that every step of the way, (from not holding hands to holding hands, from holding hands to kissing, from kissing to God – anything else - ) you need to keep giving and getting that enthusiastic yes, which, as we just said, can be obtained by a simple, “you good”? Some people call this “ongoing consent”, or they say, “consent is ongoing”, but in my legal mind, that means once you give it, it’s keeps going until the end – keeps applying to the situation and that’s just wrong. We don’t want kids to think that once you get an enthusiastic yes during a sexual encounter that you can speed on through with anything and everything you want to do! So, I think the better way to think about it and explain it is that consent is specific to each type or degree of sexual activity. Getting consent to kiss someone doesn’t mean consent to put your hands down their pants – you need another yes for that.

Specific consent also means that you need to get and give an enthusiastic yes at every single encounter. In other words, just because someone has consented with an enthusiastic yes to have oral sex or intercourse in the past, doesn’t mean they will necessarily want to do it again today. Consent is something you have to get and give at every specific encounter and every change of activity within that encounter. So, just because you’re dating, just because you did the same thing yesterday or even an hour ago, or a minute ago, doesn’t mean that consent is still good – you need to get that enthusiastic yes again and keep getting it.

Along those same lines, consent can also be withdrawn or revoked at any time. When one person says stop, or no, or I don’t want to anymore, pulls away – that’s it – no more consent. So, even if both people have their clothes off and one person changes their mind – it’s over. Even if there’s been penetration and someone says – that hurts or get off me or stop it – consent has been revoked.

Consent must also be voluntary. If someone gets a yes out of another person because they’ve threatened to tell the whole school something horrible about them, that’s not voluntary consent – that’s coercion. If someone threatens to break up with a person if they don’t say yes or say’s “you’d do it if you loved me” or kept asking over and over and over until they finally give in…none of that is voluntary consent.

Last is an issue that we really need to stress with our young people - the issue of capacity to give consent. In other words, they must be able to give their enthusiastic yes. If someone is unconscious, passed out, asleep, wasted, high, drunk, under the influence of alcohol or drugs or in any other way mentally or physically incapable of giving consent – there’s no consent! If they give consent then pass out or get drunk or fall asleep, once they lose that capacity, consent is revoked.

Because this is such a big issue in many sexual assaults and rapes, we have to stress as much as possible with our boys that if a girl has been drinking, he shouldn’t even think about sex with her. What he should be thinking about is being honorable and courageous and being an upstander that will take charge and make sure she’s taken care of and makes it home okay. Make sure he knows he can pay for that Uber if he needs to. And make sure your girl knows the same thing. If she’s been drinking, she should never consider hooking up with someone and should watch out for her friends just as we instruct our boys. Too often these things happen with people all around knowing something was going to happen or was happening and no one did a thing to help. Help them be that person who does something. Make sure they know they can text or call you and with no questions asked you will help. Come up with a plan in advance – have a codeword for “come get me” or “someone needs help.”

I realize all of this seems like common sense to us but try to remember all those years ago when it was all a hot mess of confusion. Excited confusion but still confusion. That’s where our kids are. Remember that they’re driven by emotion and fueled by an overactive reward system that makes them take crazy risks, especially when they’re around other kids. What seems pretty obvious to us, may not even register with them. And again, because of the cultural norms and what they’re used to, it can be hard for them to get it.

Of course, this isn’t an easy topic to discuss. Our kids don’t really want to talk to us about these things any more than we want to attempt the conversation. Some of it is downright embarrassing. But here’s the good thing; we don’t need to sit down and have some big talk with them anyway. That’s never going to work with any sort of discussion we want to have with our kids. Remember that anything more than a few sentences (without them engaging with us) is a lecture, and they will tune you out.

Now, if you want to try and have them listen to a bit of this episode – maybe the consent portion – they might agree and they might get something out of it but that’s not the end of it. We need to have these conversations over time, with lots of little sound bites of information sprinkled in at the right times, under the right circumstances, every time we get the opportunity or can make the opportunity.

One of the best ways, and I’ve said this before, is the car conversation, when they don’t have to make eye contact with you – bonus points if it’s at night.

I’ll give you links to some great documentaries, movies, books, and YouTube videos that will make great jumping off points for this conversation if you can ease them in somehow. Otherwise just keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities. There are always the songs they listen to in the car, the movies and YouTube videos they’re watching when you happen in their room, Instagram posts you see over their shoulder, the comments you hear your boys or girls make. You should have plenty of opportunities to jump in and say something.

The best way to start the conversation is to ask them a question: “What do you think about what he just said?” “Has anyone ever done that to you?” “Do you know anyone that’s happened to at school?” and then let them take the lead – they’ll determine how far you can get into the conversation right then. I’ve found that often when several teens are together, the conversations get really interesting, and you learn a lot more – for some reason they seem more open.

I truly hope these two episodes have given you something to think about, allowed you to see things through a different lens or consider something you’ve not considered before. But I also hope I’ve given you the information you need to discuss these issues of sexual harassment, assault, rape culture and consent with your teen or tween. Remember that having conversations like this will deepen the level of connection and trust between you and your child - and the deeper your connection, the easier the next conversations will be and the more they’ll hear you.

 

Speaking of Teens is the official podcast of neurogility.com, an organization I started to educate other moms and adolescents about emotional intelligence.

Go to neurogility.com/herewego to find all our free parenting guides and e-books to help you learn more about your teen and how to parent them in a way that increases their emotional well-being and keeps them safe.

You can go to neurogility.com/25 for this episode’s show notes (with lots of resources) and the transcript.

Thank you for joining me – I’ll see again right here again next Tuesday!