California defines what is “sexual consent”

Abstract

In recent years, sexual consent has been considered the master key to avoid sexual violence in sexual intercourse. In 2014, Jerry Brown, Governor of California, approved a law to add Section 67386 to the Educational Code. It includes the first North American definition of “affirmative consent”. In order to be valid, acquiescence must be explicit, affirmative, conscious, voluntary, and the existence of a sexual/emotional relationship should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent. Approaching the issue from a gender perspective, this paper demonstrates that the phenomenon is more complex than the given definition