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Another set of widespread assumptions about sexual activity in our culture has to do with freedom and consent. It is often assumed that people’s decisions about sex are their own. People are free, within certain limits, to make decisions about whether and when to have sex, with whom, in what ways – and whether and when to abstain. Accordingly, nobody can demand sexual activity (or sexual abstinence) from someone else – and the need for the consent of the other people involved is the primary limit on anyone’s sexual freedom.

The age at which people in England are deemed legally capable of consenting to sexual acts was raised from 12 to 13 in 1875, and to 16 in 1885. Across Europe, the age of consent varies from 14 to 18.

Pornography

Since the rise of the Internet, pornography – generally understood as visual depictions of sexual behaviour intended to arouse the viewer – is nearly all digital. ‘Mainstream’ porn is usually offered as free-to-use; it is easy to access, despite restrictions about advertising. It is also big business with ongoing investment in developing technologies. In 2018 one of the world’s biggest free-to-use digital sites, Pornhub, had 33.5 billion visits worldwide, an increase of 5 billion on the previous year, with daily visits up at almost 100 million per day and a volume of content provided to match demand. The UK is second after the US in the top 20 countries using Pornhub’s services. And Pornhub is only one of about ten major porn sites.

Preferences within digital porn sites are navigated through search term categories. Some are unvarying categories provided by the site, others are generated through the analysis of users’ search keywords. Search patterns follow the ordinary world of media: cinema, videogames, sports events, and celebrities, as well as terms of sexual preference. ‘Lesbian’ is the top search term for women and men; ‘trans’ has risen fast as a search term during 2018.

Although porn sites primarily cater for men, women users are catching up. In 2018 29% of Pornhub’s users were women. No data is offered by the sites about usage by under-18s.

‘Free’ porn makes profits through advertising based on algorithms of user preferences. The free content therefore directs users to more ‘specialised’ pay-to-use offers based on digital analysis of their usage. As with other algorithmic models, this can mean that the tastes of users are being shaped, directed and sharpened by the commercial imperatives of the business.

There are few checks upon the age or employment conditions for porn actors.¹⁰⁰

In order to be able to consent, someone also needs the mental capacity to make a choice: they need, in particular, to understand what they are being asked to do. Some people with some mental disorders may therefore not be in a position, legally, to consent.¹⁰¹

The idea of the need for consent may seem obvious now, but that has not always been the case and not just in the ancient world. You only need to think of Britain’s very deep involvement in the slave trade. Until the nineteenth century, it was possible for all kinds of people to claim absolute rights, including sexual rights, over another person simply by paying a price for them. Nor is that reality now safely confined to history. Modern slavery, where people are confined economically and physically and their bodies and labour used for others’ gain, is widespread and difficult to counter, especially with people who are in a country illegally. The UK government estimated in 2018 that there were between 10,000 and 13,000 victims of slavery in the UK, and that the number was increasing. Thousands of those people are suffering sexual exploitation.¹⁰²

Marriage was another context in which, until recently, people did not have the kind of freedom that we are discussing here. Men could not be convicted of marital rape in the UK until 1991, because it was deemed that marrying someone automatically implied consent. Marital rape was only established as an international human rights violation in 1993. In 2018, a YouGov survey of nearly 4,000 people, commissioned by the End Violence Against Women coalition, stated that ‘Almost a quarter (24 per cent) of the people we asked thought that in most cases it isn’t rape if non-consensual sex occurs within a long-term relationship.’¹⁰³

In recent years, much more attention has been paid in our society to protecting people from unwanted sexual behaviour. Intervention in cases of domestic abuse has become more common. More attention has been paid to the many forms that rape can take, even though public awareness of these developments is patchy. Rates of conviction for rape remain distressingly low, however, in part because of arguments about what constitutes consent, or the perception of consent.¹⁰⁴ The #MeToo movement and similar developments have contributed to increased awareness of many other forms of unwanted sexual behaviour, and of the harm that they do. A narrative of steadily increasing permissiveness is much too simplistic to capture the changes taking place in our culture.

One of the consequences of the #MeToo campaign has been to expose problems with consent when one party is significantly more powerful than the other. Someone might be coerced into having sex in any number of overt ways, but the coercion can also be far more subtle. Someone might agree to have sex only because of an implied threat, or because they have been subject to psychological pressure. They might agree only because refusing will have other social or professional consequences for them, or even because they are intimidated by the other person’s importance or forcefulness. While guidelines on consent, such as those given by the #Consentiseverything project, are very important, and work well in the absence of significant power dynamics, they are not enough.¹⁰⁵

Domestic abuse

‘Domestic violence’ is defined as any act or omission that causes psychological, physical, sexual or economic harm, or that restricts a person’s freedom and development by means of control or coercion,¹⁰⁶ and that takes place between adults within the context of an intimate relationship, whether dating, cohabiting, married, separated or divorced.¹⁰⁷ It might be an isolated act of physical violence, but it could equally well be an ongoing process of coercion. Violence or the threat of violence is often used by one partner to control the other, and, rather than a series of isolated incidents, forms the shape and substance of the relationship.

One in four women in England and Wales, experience some form of domestic violence in their lifetimes.¹⁰⁸ Although both men and women commit and suffer from domestic violence, the vast majority of victims are women. Women are more likely to suffer from sustained, serious forms of violence. For many women, domestic violence is thus an everyday, persistent, and sometimes deadly experience.

There is no single cause of domestic violence. Instead, a wide range of factors increases the likelihood of violence taking place in a marriage or other intimate relationship.¹⁰⁹ If families are forced to live for extended periods at close quarters, as in the lockdown imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the risk of domestic violence increases. If a society is marked by violence and insecurity, the risk increases. If there is poverty, exclusion and inequality in a community, the risk increases. If men and women’s cultural identities and social roles are rigidly established, and there is little tolerance of change, the risk increases. And if marriage is so protected that divorce is difficult to access, the risk increases.

A particularly stark statistic relates to the proportion of sexual assaults on men and women. In a survey carried out in 2016-17, 20 per cent of women and 4 per cent of men had experienced some type of sexual assault since the age of 16. This is equivalent to 3.4 million female and 631,000 male victims.¹¹⁰

We have highlighted above some changes in attitudes to sex across the twentieth century. Those changes were bound up, in part, with attempts to liberate people from situations in which sexual consent was absent or undermined. They accompanied the development of new forms of analysis – such as feminist critique – which could be used to identify the power dynamics affecting sexual relationships. The same processes, however, often led to sex being valued in its spontaneity, to be enjoyed in the moment, quite possibly with no binding promises made for the future. It has taken a long time to notice that such an approach to sex can itself work to the advantage of the most powerful in society and leaves the less powerful (women, children, the poor, the young, and those whose sexuality has given them no legal redress) vulnerable.

We should not ignore or downplay another horrific reality. As the Interim Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse says:

No-one knows, or will ever know, the true scale of child sexual abuse in England and Wales. It will always be hidden from view…

According to the 2015–16 Crime Survey for England and Wales, 7 per cent of people aged between 16 and 59 reported that they were sexually abused as a child. Although this survey did not include young children or all forms of sexual abuse, this still equates to over two million victims and survivors in that age bracket across England and Wales, a substantial proportion of the population.111

It is also worth noting the existence of ‘peer sexual abuse’, in which children are abused by other children. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reports that more and more children are contacting its Childline service to ask for advice after having been coerced by another child into unwanted sexual activity.¹¹²

The Church of England and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse highlighted the fact that the Church of England’s record on protecting people from harm, ensuring sexual safety, and upholding sexual consent, has at times been shockingly poor. There have been similar failures in the church’s protection of vulnerable adults, and its responses to domestic abuse. As a result, many do not regard the Church of England as a body that one can look to for good news in the area of sexual relationships.

This book and its accompanying resources were commissioned for the specific purpose of providing the Church of England with teaching and learning resources about human identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage, with a particular focus on the questions raised by LGBTI+ people among us. The process of creating the Living in Love and Faith resources has involved the Church of England in sustained and serious conversations about human sexuality among the bishops, members of General Synod and the Living in Love and Faith groups. Furthermore, the purpose of this book and its accompanying resources is to promote church-wide engagement, undergirded by the Pastoral Principles, that, it is hoped, will lead to a new culture of openness and mutual respect.

Questions surrounding child sexual abuse in the church relate to these overall themes. While acknowledging the reality of abuse in the church, it is important that the specific work of theological reflection on IICSA be carried out separately from the Living in Love and Faith project, and, importantly, together with victims, with great pastoral sensitivity and only after the full published findings of IICSA have been carefully assessed. However, whatever the church’s response to the changes that we are describing in this chapter, it is clear that it must be accompanied by ongoing humility, scrutiny and repentance.

There are also other questions to ask about children and consent – some of which relate to topics we will turn to later in this chapter. Who decides what action to take when children identify as trans?¹¹³ Whose responsibility is it when children are sexually active before the age of consent? Who decides how to respond to a child born with what are called ‘Variations in Sexual Characteristics’ (VSC), commonly known as intersex characteristics? We see children as needing adult protection and adults’ help to make decisions about their bodies, and yet the most fleeting look at the history of children’s treatment within families and by institutions, including the church, shows how vulnerable this leaves them to adult abuse – and how patchy, painful and difficult is their redress.

In today’s online-dominated world whole new dimensions to these concerns have emerged. Protecting the images of children’s bodies is a vital aspect of the current safeguarding agenda. Adults, too, need similar protection: images and videos of people can proliferate online and ruin lives.¹¹⁴ Some of the pressures on freedom are more subtle: people’s online choices and preferences, including the choices and preferences of children, are nudged by algorithms processing their mined data, until the question of who has actually made a particular choice becomes extremely problematic.¹¹⁵