Consent is defined as the voluntary, unambiguous agreement to participate in an act, the nature of which is known to and understood by the consenter. Consent may be given verbally or nonverbally and may be withdrawn at any time before completion of the act. See: Administrative policy regarding unlawful complaints of gender discrimination, gender/sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and intimate partner violence (5-16.2).
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1. A person may be incapable of giving consent due to physical incapacitation, physical or mental disability, threat, coercion, the influence of alcohol or drugs, or age.
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Consent is ​an action defined as the voluntary, unambiguous​ , and uncoerced ​ agreement to​ participate in an act, the nature ​and full extent of which is understood by ​all parties. Silence​ or lack of resistance cannot be the sole factor in determining consent. Consent may be​ given verbally or nonverbally. All parties are responsible for confirming that their​ counterpart(s) consent is maintained throughout the act and is present before engaging in a new act. See: Administrative policy regarding unlawful complaints of gender​ discrimination, gender/sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and intimate partner violence (5-16.2).
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​1. A person may be incapable of giving consent due to physical incapacitation, physical or mental disability, threat, coercion, the influence of alcohol or drugs, or age.
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Consent Policy
Proposed Revision
The following is the university's current policy regarding consent. The proposed revisions to the consent policy are detailed below the original. The highlighted sections are the additions aimed to be accepted by the university.
What is consent?
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a “yes!” rather than an absence of a “no”
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enthusiastic
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the responsibility of the person initiating a sexual act
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reversible
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attained with each new action or escalation
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freely given
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the key to safer, better sex
Why Affirmative Consent?
Consent is the difference between sex and sexual assault; in order to stop sexual assault, we must address the underlying paradigms that foster sexual assault and other forms of power-based violence.Using affirmative consent not only prevents assaults by having people go through the motions of gaining consent, it changes the culture around sex in a way that puts the power over a person’s body back into their hands and creates a dynamic in which partners actively recognize and respect each other’s boundaries. We are destroying one of the main notions that allows rape culture to thrive--that sex is something someone does to another--and replacing it with a model of partnership and autonomy.
We advocate an understanding of consent that is affirmative because we recognize that silence does not equate to agreement, and it is unreasonable to expect someone who already feels vulnerable to be held responsible for someone else’s actions against them. We know that many of the cases in which college students are perpetrators of sexual assault occur because of a lack of communication in ambiguous situations, in which the perpetrator moved forward without making sure that it was alright to do so. By advocating affirmative consent, we hope to stop the assaults that could have prevented with a simple “Are you okay?” as we dismantle the deeper causes of rape culture.
Goals of Policy Change
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To implement an affirmative definition of consent in Kent State University policy
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To shift the culture at KSU in such a way that students understand and use affirmative consent