There’s a big difference between “buying” a car and being “sold” one, and it can be extremely difficult to resist being sold to e.g., you know the car is somewhere out of your budget, it’s got a strange smell that suggests the previous owner was a smoker, and at the end of the day it’s just not the car you were looking for etc. However, when you’re talking to the salesperson even if they aren’t overtly pressuring you, it can often seem like you have little choice but to buy the car i.e., you need a car and although it’s not the one you want, it meets all the specifications that you gave; it would seem unreasonable not to buy it. One of the reasons – and it may mix in with others – that we often go along with something we’re not comfortable with is due to something called insinuation anxiety which is part of our “natural” social psychological make up. However, before I go into what insinuation anxiety is, and how/why it works I want to first examine compliance and consent not from the perspective of buying and selling cars but from one of personal safety.

                From a legal perspective compliance and consent can look and appear very similar e.g., someone explicitly says “yes” to having sex with another person, even though they felt pressured to do so, and actually didn’t want to do so i.e., saying “yes” is often seen as implying consent unless it was accomplished/gained through force or the threat of force etc. However, from a personal/social perspective a “yes” may be gained through compliance, and so it is worth understanding the difference between the two. Compliance is gained through external means/factors e.g., someone asks you to do something and for whatever reason(s) you go along with the request (maybe because you lack the confidence and means to reject it i.e., it is simpler/easier to just agree/comply), whereas consent is something that is internally driven and is already waiting to be given e.g., you may simply be waiting for a question to be asked and/or a request made, which you are already waiting to say “yes” to etc. There is also a difference between informed consent and uniformed consent i.e., consent that you give when you don’t have all the necessary information to make an informed decision e.g., you get into a car that’s driven by a friend without knowing that they have been drinking (personal safety extends beyond identifying predatory individuals) etc.

                Informed consent is made up of five components, and all need to be present in order for consent to be given. These are:

Mental Competence

Pertinent Information

The Ability to Evaluate

Freedom to say “No”

Authorization

If you are mentally impaired in some way, perhaps due to alcohol or drugs you may lack the competence and ability to give consent. I have written before about “scavengers”: men who hang around outside of nightclubs and bars waiting to prey on women who have been ejected from them for being too intoxicated, and who have often become separated from their friends etc. These women are normally so drunk, disoriented and exhausted that they will take help/assistance from anyone who offers it. In such a state they lack the mental competence to give informed consent. They also lack the necessary pertinent information to make a decision about whether they can give consent. Scavengers aren’t looking to develop an organic relationship with those they target, they are looking to take advantage of them. When they target an individual, they don’t tell them of their actual motive but rather they hide that and pretend to be someone who is simply offering assistance. To make an informed decision and give consent we need to have the necessary and pertinent information to do so e.g., if we knew that a driver had been drinking, we may decide not to get into the car with them.

                It is one thing to have knowledge, it’s another thing to have the ability to evaluate it. As an adult I know the potential consequences of being in car with a driver who has been drinking, however as a ten-year-old I probably lacked the ability to evaluate the risk of getting into a vehicle with one. Every decision we make carries with it some degree of risk, however if we lack the ability to evaluate and measure that risk our consent can never be truly informed. We must also have the freedom to say “no” when making a decision, and it is perhaps here that consent radically differs from compliance e.g., if we comply with a request or demand, it may be because we feel that we don’t have the ability to say no. This inability to say no may be because we don’t have  enough pertinent information available to us e.g., we feel we should say no, but we aren’t able to frame our rejection in a way that wouldn’t offend the person we are dealing with and/or escalate the situation putting us in danger etc. If these four components are in place, then we can authorize our decision to say “yes”/go along with a request. Our authorization should be active rather than passive i.e., it shouldn’t simply be the absence of “no”. This is perhaps one of the hardest parts of giving consent, which is communicating a “yes” to the other party, rather than letting them assume a “yes”; this isn’t a responsibility regarding the giving of consent, however using authorization can help set boundaries that prevent confused messaging i.e., if you are always explicit in giving a “yes” then when a yes isn’t given another person/individual can’t claim confusion/mixed messaging etc.

                So, the question remains, why do we find it so hard to say “no” and not give consent and rather find ourselves complying with requests and demands we should really reject. As can be seen, giving informed consent takes effort, it is something that is active i.e., something that we have to do and engage in etc., it doesn’t just happen. Often it is easier, less time consuming, requires less mental processing, and more importantly doesn’t require us to potentially give up social capital. Often one of the reasons we find it hard to say “no” is insinuation anxiety. Insinuation anxiety is a type of anxiety that signals a sense of our distress to the other party/person and an insinuation that the other person is untrustworthy or is looking to take advantage of us e.g., it’s one of the reasons that we agree to buy the car – we don’t want – from the salesperson ­– we don’t want to “insinuate” that their actual motive is solely to gain a commission etc. The reason we end up complying – not consenting – to a person’s request of going with them somewhere quieter at a party is because we don’t want to make them think that we see them as a sexual predator who is trying to isolate us; even when that is our actual fear.

                Sometimes when we hear about sexual assaults and we consider how they have transpired, we question the judgment and decisions that those victimized made – we think that we wouldn’t have done the things that they did etc. With hindsight, we can evaluate decisions clinically, removed from the actual situation, however, were we actually in that situation, we may have made the same choices and decisions that they did. Understanding the difference between consent and compliance, and what we actually need to have/give informed consent can help us engage in this process actively rather than passively. If we can also understand how strong insinuation anxiety is, and that it is something we have to battle and fight against, we can understand our reluctance to say “no” and conform to, and accept, another person’s requests etc.