The Law Lady: Consent Laws

So what's the big deal? Why is this even a suggestion? Because we do already have rules in the Crimes Act about what consent is and is not when it comes to sexual crimes.

So it's not as if there's no questions.

There's definitely already some stuff in place.

But current kind of thinking around consent and how consent is sort of dealt with in a legal sense is to have a kind of positive expectation or a positive kind of statement about what consent is.

And our current law does not do that.

Now, as I said, it does not mean that there is no requirement for consent.

That definitely already exists and has existed for a very long time.

But the way that we have done it historically has been to not clearly define what consent is.

Now this is not unique to sexual crimes, this is across the board.

Generally speaking our laws do not define, sort of have a neat definition of what consent looks like and historically the courts have had to decide what is and is not consent in a bunch of situations.

And that's where the challenges lie, is that although consent is a requirement, so if there is no consent, if you did not consent to whatever the sexual activity is, then it is a crime.

It is not okay, it is not sex, it is rape or unlawful sexual connection or indecent assault at that point.

So without consent, then there is no sex.

It is a crime at that point.

However, the courts have had to interpret what consent looks like in a bunch of different situations based on the facts or the information in front of them because there's no clear-cut definition of what that consent should look like.

And that has led to situations in which maybe the police have chosen not to prosecute because they aren't sure whether or not they can get a conviction, or situations where people have not been found guilty because there were some concerns about whether consent was present or not.

So it's really important to kind of remember that for many sexual crimes that question of consent is actually at the heart of the issue.

So unlike a lot of other crimes where sometimes there can be a part in which consent plays, it's not usually the main component.

But for sexual crimes it usually is.

Very few sexual assaults are the kind of stranger assaults.

They do happen but they are not the vast majority of crimes that occur in this kind of setting.

in which you have to try and work out who was it who did this crime.

So most of the time where these kinds of things are happening, the person who did it is already known.

It is often a family member, a friend, someone you meet at a party, somebody that you know, the person you are in a relationship with.

They are much more likely to be the perpetrators of the crime than a stranger.