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Sexual consent: ‘They grab your arse or boobs and think it’s ok’

The Women’s Podcast: Kathleen Harris talks to students and experts about sexual consent workshops in Irish universities

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Kathleen Harris
Mon Oct 10 2016 - 11:00

“It’s actually worrying how common it is going out and getting touched,” says a female 20-year-old Irish student who wishes to remain anonymous. “You’re just in a club and they grab your arse or they grab yours boobs and they think that’s ok.”

“It’s always the really drunk guy or the really drunk girl being taken advantage of at the end of the night,” says Aaron Murphy, a student at NCI in Dublin. “You can kinda see it brewing up with lads looking over throughout the night saying, ‘Ok, she’s going over for her next Jäger’. I wasn’t aware of how bad it was until we started talking about consent more lately.”

A number of Irish universities will be running sexual consent workshops this academic year. Trinity College for example held workshops in September for first-year students living in residence halls. The TCD Students’ Union decided to introduce the workshops after a campus survey found that one in four women has had a non-consensual sexual experience while in university.

The response to such workshops has been mixed. Critics dismiss them (people don’t need to be taught not to rape, they know it’s wrong). They say they overstep personal boundaries and demonise men, branding them all as latent rapists.

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Irish college students talk about sexual assault, rape and their thoughts on campus culture and consent. Video: Kathleen Harris

Elaine Byrnes, one of the co-creators of the Smart Consent workshops developed by NUI Galway’s School of Psychology, disagrees. She says, “It’s not a class about rape or sexual assault. It’s to encourage people to identify what consent means to them, focusing on empowering students and equipping them with the tools to confidently, assertively, affirmatively negotiate and communicate consent.”

In this Irish Times video and in The Women's Podcast, we speak to Elaine Byrnes about what these workshops entail and what they hope to achieve; the CEO of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre about the kinds of calls the centre receives from young people; and a number of Irish students, all in their early 20s, about their own experiences with sexual assault and rape, and their thoughts on campus culture and consent.