Joanna Gray
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
Much ire was directed at the Home Office when it issued leaflets to illegal immigrants reminding them not to rape women and children. This was troubling for two reasons:
- Why was the leaflet needed if such men were, as we have been promised, mere future engineers and brain surgeons?
- If they were in fact dormant rapists and paedophiles, a leaflet was a rather pathetic method of stopping such future crimes.
This muddled thinking extends also to actual future engineers and brain surgeons who are starting university every year and being forced to take flimsy consent courses in a feeble effort to stop them strangling fellow students.
I have been sent a screenshot of one such course by a friend whose mild-mannered son is beginning a degree in engineering at a Russell Group university. The consent course screenshot reads:
“Why Consent Matters: Non-fatal strangulation and consent. Non-fatal strangulation (sometimes referred to as choking) involves pressure being applied to a person’s neck, affecting their breathing, blood flow to the brain or both. It can involve hands, an arm or another object being placed around the…” [screenshot ends.] My friend had captioned the pic: “Son gutted by the news he shouldn’t strangle girls. He’ll have to find another hobby.” [Joke!]
Our eldest is soon starting at one of the increasing number of universities that make such courses compulsory. He has to look forward to a “two-hour active bystander course”, a “one-hour interactive (surely not role play?!) consent course” and an “online safeguarding course”. Oxford and Cambridge also have compulsory consent courses. How different from my first night at university in 1996, when a now Professor of Cardiology was sick all over my new dress at the freshers’ bop.
Has society so deteriorated that action does indeed need to be taken to stop young men strangling women when they go to university? There are no official figures about sexual strangulation, in spite of it becoming a standalone offence in 2022. The Institute for Addressing Strangulation (IFAS), established in the same year and funded by the Home Office, includes one survey of self-reporting participants that found 21 per cent experienced negative effects of being strangled during sex. It seems a circular moral panic. What on earth is going on?
For those readers who have vanilla sexual preferences, please look away now. If you return to the consent course text, it reads: non-fatal strangulation and consent. There is a dubious idea that strangling during sex can prolong the orgasm (it was only 21 per cent of strangled participants who reported a negative effect). So knotted are the sexual mores of today that strangulation has to be specifically referred to as non-fatal, because evidently strangulation for the purposes of prolonging the orgasm – so long as everyone consents – is fine.
Porn culture and OnlyFans are sometimes cited as driving this imagined thirst for strangling women, but certain studies suggest strangling and non-consensual aggression during sex were rarely searched-for terms. In fact, the most popular searches on Pornhub are: Hentai (Japanese pornographic anime), MILF (very pleasing to this 48-year-old mother of three) and demure. Yes, demure. Even porn addicts don’t go in for strangling women.
Is it possible, then, to conclude that:
- Young men don’t want to strangle women
- Young men are not strangling women
- Consent courses about not strangling women are therefore unnecessary
- Universities and other institutions only insist on them as bureaucratic cover
I have been asked recently what success looks like for right-leaning people. One of the metrics, for me, would be the stripping out of such courses from a whole range of institutions. By the time teenagers go to university they are legal adults. If they commit crimes, whether sexual or otherwise, they should be arrested, punished and not released because the Conservatives forgot to increase prison capacity. We should return to the ancient common law principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty – and not treated as potentially guilty unless a consent or safeguarding course has been completed.
Stop Press: A “deeply concerning” lesson on consent is teaching asylum seekers how to avoid sleeping with underage girls in Britain, according to the Mail.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
