By Julia Scheinbeim
In the sex ed community, I think we can all agree that sexual assault prevention is a key piece of sexual health. And how do you prevent sexual assault? Well it’s a complex issue tied up in gender roles, sexual scripts, and discomfort with communication during a sexual encounter, but at the core of respectful sex is the concept of consent. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot of resources out there to help us educate about how to actually “do” consent in real life. Without providing good models of what consent can and should look like in a variety of situations, just telling young people that consent is important won’t get us very far. To help in this effort, Planned Parenthood Federation of America developed a series of four videos that model consent in different situations:
1. How Do You Know if Someone Wants to Have Sex with You?
This video breaks down consent into all of its key elements, from free and enthusiastic consent, to the issues that come with intoxication.
2. When You Know They’re Into It
This video shows three different examples of what enthusiastic consent looks like, including asking and answering.
3. When They’re Kinda Into It
This video shows three different examples of what it looks like when someone is hesitant about something, whether it’s safer sex or the actual sexual activity. It models good ways to handle these “check in” moments when you get a potentially not-so-enthusiastic vibe from your partner.
4. When They’re Just Not Into It
This video shows three different examples of what it looks like to respectfully hear a “no” and move on without hurting anyone.
These videos are geared for older teens and young adults (17-22). The videos are different from most of what is available on this topic in that they address both verbal and non-verbal cues. They also show a range of people and relationships, with different gender expressions, sexual orientations, races and ethnicities to make them more relatable to a wide audience. We encourage sex educators working with older high school and college-age youth to incorporate the videos into their work. And of course, we want to make it easy for you to include these videos in your in-person sex education, so we also developed two lesson plans that use these videos. One lesson plan is totally focused on consent. The other uses the videos to facilitate discussion about media literacy and how sexual communication is (or isn’t) portrayed in pop culture. Have any questions or want the lesson plans that go along with these videos? E-mail education@ppfa.org.
