Consent can’t just be “taught”, it needs to be Supported
I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the role that other people play in how someone with a disability learns about consent. Consent isn’t only a skill that gets acquired in a lesson. Real consent means knowing you can say yes and, just as importantly, that you can say no, even when it goes against what someone else wants of you. It depends on having been taught that your needs are worth stating and worth hearing.
Systems, organizations, and the people around a person directly shape whether consent is ever learned. Unfortunately, the way our systems currently treat people with disabilities, someone may learn the opposite: that consent doesn’t really apply to them. This often happens when the focus is on “compliance.” When outside demands are treated as more important than a person’s actual needs, someone with a disability can learn to set their own needs aside, to the point where they may lose track of what those needs even are. And if you don’t know what makes you comfortable or uncomfortable, consent becomes very hard to give or withhold.
That has real consequences for safety and abuse prevention, which I’ll take up in a future post. For now I want to stay with something more foundational: how our systems and our everyday interactions can quietly teach a person that consent was never theirs to give.
From a young age, people with disabilities are expected to comply with outside demands. They are expected to put someone else’s needs ahead of their own. Going along with things gets reinforced, and speaking up for yourself can get discouraged or even punished.
In a Substack article called “The 7 Forms of Autonomy That Create Autistic Nervous System Safety,” neuropsychologist Dr. Zonya Mitchell describes some autistic people as living “a life where nearly every decision has slowly become shaped by someone else’s expectations. What to say, how to act, when to rest, how much masking is ‘acceptable,’ or what emotions are ok to express.” When your life has been shaped this way for long enough, you may not even know what your own needs are. And if you don’t know what your needs are, advocating for them becomes almost impossible.
Rebecca Cokley puts this even more directly. In her essay “The Anti-Abortion Bill You Aren’t Hearing About,” in the collection Disability Visibility, she writes:
When you feel that your body belongs to everyone but you, can you really consent? Are you going to push and fight for your needs?
It isn’t only that a person learns not to speak up. They can learn something more basic: that their own wants and needs are not really the kind of thing you say out loud. And this reaches further than small preferences. Stating your needs is also how you stay safe, how you ask for what protects you and refuse what puts you in danger. Learning to stay quiet costs a person both.
Over time that chips away at a person’s sense that they are someone whose wants matter and are worth expressing. This doesn’t always happen through anything intentional. It builds up through years of being the person things are done to and decided for, rather than the person who is asked. And even being asked isn’t enough on its own. What matters is whether we honor the answer when it goes against what we wanted to hear.
So, if systems and the people in them can teach a person that consent doesn’t apply to them, then those same systems and people can teach the opposite. Consent isn’t only something we deliver in a lesson and check off. It’s something we support, or fail to support, in the way we set up a room, run a program, and carry ourselves in a hundred small interactions.
None of this fits in a lesson plan. It shows up in the way we respond when someone tells us no, or asks for something we didn’t expect. The materials and lessons matter, and I’ll keep making them. But they land very differently for a person who has been shown, again and again, that what they want is worth asking about.
References:
Cokley, R. (2020). The anti-abortion bill you aren’t hearing about. In A. Wong (Ed.), Disability visibility: First-person stories from the twenty-first century (pp. 159–163). Vintage Books.
Mitchell, Z. (2026, July 21). The 7 forms of autonomy that create autistic nervous system safety. The Autism Doctor. https://theautismdoctor.substack.com/p/the-7-forms-of-autonomy-that-create