ABSTRACT
Before the 1990s, students and researchers with an interest in reading about sexual consent would have struggled to find an academic literature. Except within feminist critiques of hetero-patriarchal society, and principally the work of radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin (1974, 1981, 1988) and Catherine MacKinnon (1989, 1996), the idea of sexual consent did not attract critical interest. The focus of discussion, understandably, was on the prevalence and incidence of non consenting sex and the crisis of rape, forced sex and sexual abuse against women - both in the public epidemic of sexual violence and abuse and the more insidious and normalised abuse within private relationships. This focus on non-consent had the effect of producing diverse and widely varying definitions of consent/non consent, used by different researchers with different disciplinary focus, leading to widely varying arguments and statistical interpretations of rape and sexual violence and abuse, with much attendant public controversy (for discussion see Cowling, 1998,2003; Muehlenhard, 1992; Johnson and Sigler, 1997).
