This current and timely volume presents new thinking and new directions in feminist legal scholarship. Rethinking key concepts in legal feminism, Cowan and Hunter provide a unique examination of key socio-legal concepts in law, jurisprudence and legal and political theory. Written by an international cast of contributors, offering different cultural perspectives as well as doctrinal and theoretical knowledge, this collection of essays presents a dialogue between different feminist positions and approaches to a common theme. It addresses a range of questions, including: Can 'consent' be rethought and infused with different meanings in a post-liberal feminist politics? Can the concepts of 'choice' and 'consent' have consistent meanings and functions between different areas of law, or whether they prove to be highly contingent when viewed across the broad field of law. Exploring the deeply gendered concepts of ‘choice’ and ‘consent’ and examining the philosophical and jurisprudential issues surrounding them as well as how ‘choice’ and ‘consent’ operate in particular areas of law, including criminal law, medical law, constitutional law, employment law, family law and civil procedure, this volume is a key resource for postgraduate law students studying jurisprudence.

A scientific study of the political and economic factors influencing democratic decision making

What exactly is consent? Why does it matter? How can you respect other people’s boundaries, and have them respect yours? Can We Talk About Consent? breaks down the basics of how to give and get consent in every aspect of life for readers aged 14 years and older. It's a powerful word, but not everyone understands exactly what it means. This stylish guide explains clearly why consent matters—for all of us. With honest explanations by experienced sex and relationships educator Justin Hancock, you'll learn how consent is a vital part of how we connect with ourselves and our self-esteem, the people close to us, and the wider world. The book covers a broad range of topics, including: how we greet each other how to choose things for ourselves how we say no to things communicating and respecting choices in sexual relationships the factors that can affect a person's ability to choose how to empower other people by giving them consent And—there's a whole lot of pizza. This guide to consent gives you all the tools you need to build consensual relationships.

While the importance of consent has been discussed widely over the last few decades, interest in its study has received renewed attention in recent years, particularly regarding medical treatment, clinical research and sexual acts. The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Consent is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into five main parts: • General questions • Normative ethics • Legal theory • Medical ethics • Political philosophy. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including: the nature and normative importance of consent, paternalism, exploitation and coercion, privacy, sexual consent, consent and criminal law, informed consent, organ donation, clinical research, and consent theory of political obligation and authority. The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Consent is essential reading for students and researchers in moral theory, applied ethics, medical ethics, philosophy of law and political philosophy. This volume will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as political science, law, medicine and social science.

The developmental challenges of children with special needs means they are often more at risk of physical or emotional exploitation. This book provides invaluable tools to help parents, carers and teachers protect vulnerable children. Difficult topics are sensitively and straightforwardly addressed through step-by-step guidelines for parents and learning activities for children. Guidance to carers includes information on how to identify warning signs of abuse, and recognise tell-tale behaviour changes in their child. Intervention activities help children learn which adults to trust and how to stay safe, while reducing the fear, shame or stigma surrounding abuse. Aimed at ages 5-12, these learning devices have been specifically designed to meet a range of comprehension and developmental abilities, with instructions for parents to adapt them to meet the specific needs of their child. This important guidebook empowers adults to fulfil their responsibility to protect and support children, and to provide a safe environment in which every child can reach their highest potential free from coercion or abuse.

The issue of sexual consent has stimulated much debate in the last decade. The contributors to this illuminating volume make sense of sexual consent from various conceptual standpoints: socio-legal, post-structural, philosophical and feminist. The volume comprises a range of studies, all based around consent within a specific context such as criminal justice, homosexuality, sadomasochism, prostitution, male rape, learning disabilities, sexual ethics, and the age of consent. It is the first collection to publish exclusively on issues of sexual consent, and both makes sense of sexual consent in contemporary society and guides debate towards better consent standards and decisions in the future. Making Sense of Sexual Consent will excite considerable discussion amongst academics, professionals and all those who think that freedom to make decisions about our sexual selves is important. It will set the agenda for debate on sexual consent into the 21st Century.

Free and informed consent is one of the most widespread and morally important practices of modern health care; competence to consent is its cornerstone. In this book, Becky Cox White provides a concise introduction to the key practical, philosophical, and moral issues involved in competence to consent. The goals of informed consent, respect for patient autonomy and provision of beneficent care, cannot be met without a competent patient. Thus determining a patient's competence is the critical first step to informed consent. Determining competence depends on defining it, yet surprisingly, no widely accepted definition of competence exists. White identifies nine capacities that patients must exhibit to be competent. She approaches the problem from the task-oriented nature of decision making and focuses on the problems of defining competence within clinical practice. Her proposed definition is based on understanding competence as occurring in a special rather than a general context; as occurring in degrees rather than at a precise threshold; as independent of consequential appeals; and as incorporating affective as well as cognitive capacities. Combining both an ethical overview and practical guidelines, this book will be of value to health care professionals, bioethicists, and lawyers.

Consent is used in many different social and legal contexts with the pervasive understanding that it is, and has always been, about autonomy – but has it? Beginning with an overview of consent’s role in law today, this book investigates the doctrine’s inseparable association with personal autonomy and its effect in producing both idealised and demonised forms of personhood and agency. This prompts a search for alternative understandings of consent. Through an exploration of sexual offences in Antiquity, medical practice in the Middle Ages, and the regulation of bodily harm on the present-day sports field, this book demonstrates that, in contrast to its common sense story of autonomy, consent more often operates as an act of submission than as a form of personal freedom or agency. The book explores the implications of this counter-narrative for the law’s contemporary uses of consent, arguing that the kind of freedom consent is meant to enact might be foreclosed by the very frame in which we think about autonomy itself. This book will be of interest to scholars of many aspects of law, history, and feminism as well as students of criminal law, bioethics, and political theory.

The concept of canine consent is far more than simply a buzzword in modern dog training practices. In its current form, consent is a distinctly human concept, designed by humans and for humans. Looking beyond species boundaries can help us not only consider concepts of canine consent and autonomy, but it can also help us to apply these concepts in our everyday interactions with dogs, which is fundamental for any professional working with dogs as well as for everyday dog caregivers. This canine-indexed definition of consent includes a model of five major categories: Touch/interaction-based consent, cooperative care using learned consent behaviours, activity consent, consent-based learning, and substitutive consent. These categories involve a two-way communication system, integration of salient choices, teaching consent behaviours and incorporating existing training protocols that adhere to the Humane Hierarchy of best practices, and an evaluation of dependent decision-making in extenuating circumstances. This book aims to merge the existing literature and new understandings about canine consent to paint a complete picture. It will challenge the current expectations of dogs and dog behaviour in our society with an intention of considering their perspectives, experiences, and emotional needs. It will be important reading for veterinary professionals, dog trainers and behaviourists, those involved in work with therapy dogs, and anybody working with or caring for dogs.

Substantial efforts have recently been made to reform the physician-patient relationship, particularly toward replacing the `silent world of doctor and patient' with informed patient participation in medical decision-making. This 'new ethos of patient autonomy' has especially insisted on the routine provision of informed consent for all medical interventions. Stronly supported by most bioethicists and the law, as well as more popular writings and expectations, it still seems clear that informed consent has, at best, been received in a lukewarm fashion by most clinicians, many simply rejecting what they commonly refer to as the `myth of informed consent'. The purpose of this book is to defuse this seemingly intractable controversy by offering an efficient and effective operational model of informed consent. This goal is pursued first by reviewing and evaluating, in detail, the agendas, arguments, and supporting materials of its proponents and detractors. A comprehensive review of empirical studies of informed consent is provided, as well as a detailed reflection on the common clinician experience with attempts at informed consent and the exercise of autonomy by patients. In the end, informed consent is recast as a management tool for pursuing clinically and ethically important goods and values that any clinician should see as meriting pursuit. Concurrently, the model incorporates a flexible, anticipatory approach that recognizes that no static, generic ritual can legitimately pursue the quite variable goods and values that may be at stake with different patients in different situations. Finally, efficiency of provision is addressed by not pursuing the unattainable and ancillary. Throughout, the traditional principle of beneficence is appealed to toward articulating an operational model of informed consent as an intervention that is likely to change outcomes at the bedside for the better.