Do you know whether you live in a place where “no” means “no”? Many states still define rape or sexual assault exclusively in terms of physical violence, not consent, and young people’s cultural understanding of what it means to hold someone accountable for their sexual safety has wildly outgrown local laws.
Statistically speaking, you or someone you know has experienced a sexual violation. There’s also a high chance that you or someone you know caused one. Perhaps these incidents had a clear perpetrator and victim. Or maybe you’ve encountered one of the more complicated situations where it’s not quite so obvious that one person intentionally hurt another. Violated: Sexual Consent and Assault in the Twenty-First Century focuses on that messy place of unintentional, thoughtless, or perhaps even reckless consent violations. It explores the gender dynamics and dating norms that contribute to those violations and the disconnect between models of “good consent” and lived realities. The book also discusses what you, your organizations, and your government can do to help reduce the scope of sexual violation. Tackling this issue on multiple levels of society at once will vastly improve our odds of success. But more than anything, this book wants to change the way you and your friends think and talk about sexual consent and violation by changing our frameworks, logic, and discourse to focus more on gender equality and realistic good intentions.
Julie Fennell researches gender, sexuality, and demography and is author of Please Scream Quietly: A Story of Kink. Her research has been published in Sexualities, Sociological Forum, Contraception, Gender & Society, and more. J. Remy Green is a practicing attorney specializing in issues relating to consent, Me Too, and the First Amendment, including a sub-specialty in defending rape survivors against defamation claims made by their rapists.

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