Informed consent
Informed consent is a legal condition whereby a person can be said to have given consent based upon a full appreciation and understanding of the facts and implications of any actions, with the individual being in possession of all of his faculties (not mentally retarded or mentally ill), and his judgment not being impaired at the time of consenting (by sleepiness, intoxication by alcohol or drugs, other health problems, etc.).
In many countries, people cannot give informed consent until they reach a certain age. The argument is that as a child the person might be incapable of comprehending the arguments and information, and thus could give consent, but even after the act of informing the child the consent would not be considered as based on being informed. The term age of consent is especially applied to consenting to sexual acts.
Some acts cannot legally take place because of a lack of informed consent, e.g. sexual acts, in other cases consent of legal parents or guardians of a child on its behalf is valid.
In some States, Informed Consent laws (sometimes called "Right To Know" laws) require that a woman seeking an elective abortion be given factual information by the abortion provider about her legal rights, alternatives to abortion (such as adoption), available public and private assistance, and medical facts, before the abortion is performed (usually 24 hours in advance of the abortion). These laws have been shown to reduce the frequency of abortion by 10-20%.[1]
People must give informed consent before medical operations, and doctors may be sued for not giving their patients a full awareness of the risks associated with such things as medical trials of new medications and operations. In one British case, a doctor performing routine surgery on a woman noticed that she had cancerous tissue in her womb. He took the decision to remove the woman's womb; however, as she had not given informed consent for this operation, the doctor was judged by the General Medical Council to have acted negligently. The council said that the woman should have been informed of her condition, and allowed to make her own decision.
The question of whether informed consent needs to be formally given before sexual intercourse or other sexual activity, and whether this consent can be withdrawn at any time during the act, is an issue which is currently being discussed in the United States in regard to rape and sexual assault legislation.
It may not be possible to give consent to certain activities in certain jurisdictions; see the Operation Spanner case for an example of this in the UK.
Informed consent is also important in social research. For example in survey research, people need to give informed consent before they participate in the survey.
Summary
Playing consensually does not mean you need a written witnessed agreement every time you play, nor does it mean that once they consent, anything goes. It means only playing with people who are normally considered fit to enter into a binding contract, and only doing things to them while you have a very sound expectation that, were they requested to explicitly indicate their consent to your actions when in a fit state of mind and being neither cooerced nor misled, they would do so.
The Simple Rules:
1. Don't play with people who can't be held fully responsibile for their own actions (eg the mad, senile, immature or otherwise incompetant).
2. Know what your partner's limits are - what they do not consent to.
3. Confirm that they understand any physical and emotional risks involved.
4. Make sure your partner has an unambiguous way to indicate that they withdraw their consent, if they change their mind during the scene. You are responsible for detecting if they fall into a mental or physical state where they are hindered from indicating or choosing to indicate.
5. If you are about to do an action to them which they would have no chance to indicate their lack of consent to before it happened, and there is any doubt that they might not consent, ask them beforehand to indicate their consent explicitly.
6. If at any time your partner, while in a fit state of mind, indicates that they do not consent to your doing an action to them, or that they withdraw consent they previously gave, then don't do it. If you have already started doing it, then stop as soon as safely possible.
7. If your partner is not in a fit state of mind to choose whether to consent or not, which can happen on occasions such as when drunk, asleep, or drugged, then it is your responsibility to make that choice for them. In general you should choose to not play with them, unless you gained their explicit consent beforehand to play with them in this condition.
One exception to that would be when a masochist is so high on endorphines that they are in no fit state to judge whether to continue or not, because entering that state was a possibile risk of your flogging them, and since you confirmed your partner understood this risk (see rule 2) and they consented in knowledge of it, their consent to let you judge when to stop is strongly implicit. On the other hand, in that situation you also have a duty to stop the scene when warranted, even if they are crying "More!".
See also
External Links
- Age Of Consent - a comprehensive source on age of consent (sexual consent/coming of age) laws and sex laws around the world.
