May 28, 2018
How do you know whether your partner agrees with the sexual engagement or not? What kind of signals can be considered as a “yes”? Does going back to your apartment mean he or she definitely agrees to have sex with you? If he/she is drunk is he/she qualified to give consent?
These are the questions we all kind of know, or think we know, but don’t necessarily understand as clearly as we might like to think. With the recent emergence of two alleged sexual assault cases against Jonathan Kaiman, the former President of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China and Beijing Bureau Chief of Los Angeles Times, sexual consent has become a hot topic especially in the correspondent community in the capital lately, with diverging opinions on both sides.
Rather than discussing the details of these individual cases, we invited Yuan Yang, Beijing correspondent for the Financial Times, to talk about what consent means under different circumstances. Growing up in the UK, Yuan has been hosting consent workshops since a sexual assault case occurred in a public area in her university.
The aim here is not to reach a concrete conclusion on consent, but we hope this podcast can provide some different perspectives and angles on the topic and contribute or lead to an inclusive and constructive discussion in the Beijing foreign correspondents community on these issues.