Active* Consent: Using Data and the Creative Arts to Transform Ireland’s Consent Education Landscape

Details of the Impact

Active* Consent’s origins begin in the university classroom and with small focus groups of students at the University of Galway (then NUI Galway) in 2013. Our founding programme team (McIvor, MacNeela, O’Higgins) started out wanting to know what university students understood about sexual consent and what were the blockages to understanding and communication of consent. At the time, minimal Irish data for this demographic group’s experience of either sexual consent or sexual violence and harassment while in university existed- the first gap that MacNeela responded to through preliminary survey and focus group work at the local institutional level. In 2014, McIvor came on board to devise a research-based play responding to these initial findings with Drama and Theatre Studies students, and in 2015, O’Higgins developed the first iteration of our consent workshops with MacNeela and McIvor with the ambition to facilitate them not only on our campus but nationally and more recently, internationally.

Between 2015-2018, we kept expanding our data base as well as reworking our key assets like the play and the workshop, which was the first of our assets to be initially scaled out across ultimately 22 Irish higher-education institutions with 75,000 students now having completed our third-level workshops since 2017 and more than 1600 third-level staff and students trained as workshop facilitators. We also began work on creative arts/communications campaigns and further training and development strategies to build our capacity to deliver our resources at scale, to and develop the individuals rolling them out on campuses or in other settings.   

After securing core philanthropic funding from Lifes2Good Foundation, University of Galway and Rethink Ireland in 2019, the scale of Active* Consent’s impact rapidly expanded. We led on the 2020 Sexual Experiences Survey in partnership with the Union of Students in Ireland, which was the first comprehensive Irish snapshot of positive and negative student sexual health experiences grounded by internationally recognised assessment strategies and continued on to analyse data for another national survey in 2021, the Higher Education Authority’s Report on the National Survey of Student Experiences of Sexual Violence and Harassment in Irish Higher Education Institutions. Citing the Sexual Experiences Survey, Taoiseach Simon Harris, then Minister for Further and Higher Education, Innovation and Science and the CEO of the Higher Education Authority, Dr Alan Wall, wrote to third-level institution presidents in 2020 to require that students are provided with mainstreamed consent education. All HEIs were subsequently required to publish consent, sexual violence and harassment Action Plans and to make annual reports as part of the strategic dialogue with the HEA.

 In addition to driving progress on consent education within third-level education, we broadened our scope between 2019-2022 to serve post-primary education, Further Education and Training, sports organisations and groups and other bespoke partners including Teagsac, the Irish Army and An Garda Síochana and began adapting our programme to international contexts including Britain, Wales and Northern Ireland. 

Continuing also to collaborate with partners who have included the Galway Rape Crisis Centre, Rape Crisis Network Ireland and the Union of Students in Ireland, Active* Consent now adapts our signature initiatives for new or continuing groups by working from our common core of a tiered, spiral model of increasing complexity.  We begin with brief social media messaging, workshops and creative arts-based interventions including our original play, short videos, social media campaigns, and also provide specialised training for staff members and community leaders based on their needs. In addition to these core resources, we have also developed two eLearning modules, a 10-ECTs continuous professional development module (with Galway Rape Crisis Centre) for those working in this area, and a First Point of Contact training in sexual violence disclosure skills (with Galway Rape Crisis Centre) for educators and leaders.

One of our most important learnings in the past decade is that consent education for young people becomes sustainable when it is part of a broader programme of culture change and emphasises non-judgemental and sex-positive messaging. Feedback on our programme from key stakeholders across all areas of our programming consistently supports this claim.  A third-level student leader shared that Active* Consent’s “work is changing society and the mindsets of people,” while another student offered that our all-campus approach “creates a real safe space in the college knowing that everyone had received the training.” One of our YouthReach resource manager partners reflected:

By 2021, the Government of Ireland commissioned us to create the first-ever national publicly available online resource on consent awareness and learning in recognition of our broad reach and growing repertoire of evidence-based materials for different audiences.  ConsentHub.ie provides reliable, evidence-based information to young people under 17, over 17, to parents and guardians, and to educators. Significantly, over 40% of visitors to ConsentHub.ie have been male in line with our goal of consent education that is inclusive of all genders, sexualities and types of relationships from committed to casual.

Active* Consent’s ongoing emphasis on the Creative Arts and storytelling approaches as key to the dissemination of our research and design of our materials has been central to the ongoing cohesion of our programme materials.  This is evident through our demonstrated ability to connect with students, educators, parents, policy makers and other members of the public and not only tell the story of our data through our diverse resources, but to effectively engage users in a dialogue about their own perceptions and personal practices regarding sexuality and consent in interactive learning environments that range from once-off experiences (like the play or workshop) to longer extended immersions (as in our modules). Audience feedback about the play in particular has reinforced the power of this dialogical, evidence-based and sex-positive approach across several live theatre tours for third-level (2019-2020, 2022, 2024) and secondary school (2022, 2024) student audiences.

A gender non-conforming student reflected:

A male pupil concurred that the play