ABSTRACT
This chapter explores different conceptualisations of consent – as a bureaucratic procedure, a legal concern, and an ethical process – and how these ideas are tested by challenging situations, such as filming with vulnerable people, and when participants decide to withdraw. Although the consent process is ostensibly an affirmation of contributors’ inviolable rights and autonomy, my research demonstrates that it is designed to serve the interests of broadcasters and producers more than participants – and in the worst examples, it can be used to make them feel they have made an irrevocable commitment, and disabuse them of their ongoing rights.
