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Originally Posted by PepsiFree
If you think the law is saying you need to ask your long term partner with whom you already share mutual respect, trust, and understanding if it’s OK to do every single thing you’re doing every single time you’re doing it, you’re probably overthinking it.
This is far less complex and consent is request/granted in far more natural, straightforward ways than people are making it out to be. If the concept of consent is hard to grasp in your own life, this is a problem.
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One of our resident lawyers disagrees:
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Difficulties in defining bright lines in this area of human behaviour are, in practice, revealing a routine disconnect between what the law is and how members of society generally act. How the law is applied to factual circumstances is, in my opinion, becoming increasingly unpredictable and therefore unsatisfactory for the realm of criminal law.
In my estimation, there is a high frequency of sexual interactions every day in Canada that would not be thought of by an average person as unlawful, and yet are prohibited sexual assault. As such, whether a person faces a sexual assault prosecution has become increasingly dictated by one factor: whether a sexual partner decides to make a police report alleging non-consensual sexual contact.
Do not get me wrong, I am not commenting here on the issue of false accusations at all. I am saying that we have developed the law of sexual assault in Canada to the point that what is defined as and criminalized as sexual assault includes conduct that most in society would not think there is a crime.
https://forum.calgarypuck.com/showpo...postcount=1667
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As does at least one member of the Supreme Court of Canada (from the linked comment):
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Adopting the Crown’s position would also require us to find that cohabiting partners across Canada, including spouses, commit a sexual assault when either one of them, even with express prior consent, kisses or caresses the other while the latter is asleep. The absurdity of this consequence makes plain that it is the product of an unintended and unacceptable extension of the Criminal Code provisions upon which the Crown would cause this appeal to rest.
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This isn’t defending the actions of the accused in the case we’re talking about. If they didn’t, they should have obtained explicit consent before they acted. But looking at sexual behaviour in general, it’s simply not true that it’s straightforward for people of good will to avoid falling afoul of our consent laws.