FRIES, One Letter at a Time: Freely Given
If you’ve followed my earlier posts on consent, you know I believe it’s worth slowing down and teaching well. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do, one letter at a time. Many educators use the acronym FRIES, created by Planned Parenthood, to break consent into five parts: consent should be freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific. I love how it gets into the nitty gritty of what consent really requires. Over the next several posts, I’ll take each letter in turn and turn it into concrete lessons, materials, and games you can actually use. This post kicks things off with the very first letter, the “F,” which stands for freely given.
But I’ve found that simply presenting this concept to my clients with autism or developmental disabilities is not enough. They need more. They need didactic instruction that explains exactly what each piece means. They need scenarios that help them see the concept in action. They need adults in their lives who model and respect consent. And they need chances to practice consent in low stakes, neutral ways.
I want to be upfront about what my lessons do and don’t do. They focus on one specific piece: helping someone identify when they are being coerced. That matters, because sometimes people with disabilities don’t know they’re being taken advantage of for the simple reason that no one has ever explicitly taught them. No one has sat them down and explained that a threat is coercive and wrong, or that a bribe is still a bribe even when it looks like a nice offer. Explicit instruction on how consent gets violated through bribes, threats, and force is a necessary part of the package. But it is one part. The rest of this post is about the bigger picture those lessons sit inside.
Why this is so hard to teach
For many of the people we serve, coercion is not a rare event to be spotted. It’s the water they swim in, especially in compliance-based education programs. A client’s body may be sending a signal that something icky is happening, but they’ve been taught to ignore that signal and comply with the demand in front of them. In other words, some of our own teaching strategies quietly set people up to be taken advantage of. We reward going along with things and we treat “no” as a behavior to reduce.
What we can actually do about it
Make refusal work in real life, in low stakes, constantly. Assent and assent withdrawal built into ordinary teaching does more for the “freely given” piece than any standalone lesson, because it’s the thing that teaches “my no is honored.” You can’t credibly teach someone that they get to decline sex or touch if declining the green cup or the next trial has never once worked for them.
Start small and start nonsexual. Just like good sex education, this works best when it’s continuous rather than one and done. Sex, dating, and romance carry a lot of feelings, and we absolutely want to take time with all of that. But an easy way in is to begin with the nonsexual and nonromantic pieces of relationship safety and gradually move toward sexual consent from there.
The lessons
That gradual, build-it-up approach is exactly what these activities are made for. Each packet takes one coercion tactic and makes it concrete. Learners define the tactic both receptively and expressively, sort through examples and nonexamples, and then use videos and scenarios to practice spotting the tactic in action and explaining how they knew. By the end, the skill isn’t abstract. It’s something they’ve named, seen, and identified for themselves, over and over, in low stakes practice before it ever counts for real.
Each packet also closes the loop on safety. Every scenario asks the learner to name the people in their life they can go to when they think they’re being manipulated. That piece is not an add-on. Safety is never something a person secures alone by catching every red flag. It takes a team of people invested in keeping them safe, and these lessons build that team into the skill itself.
If you’re looking for a place to start teaching relationship safety in a way that’s explicit, concrete, and actually reachable for your learners, these are built to do exactly that.
Link to “Force” Lesson: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Lessons-on-Consent-Force-16755528
Link to “Threats” lesson: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Lessons-on-Consent-Threats-16755584
Link to “Bribes” Lesson: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Lessons-on-Consent-Bribes-16755554
To help you put this into practice right away, I’ve put together a free handout on teaching the “F.” It breaks down what freely given actually means, the smaller skills hiding underneath it, and how the real skill this week is “no”: saying it, having it accepted the first time, and watching the people around you take no for an answer gracefully. From there it walks through three levels of practice, starting with simple things supporters can do in everyday moments, moving to natural opportunities you can catch as they come up, and ending with planned games like the “No Thank You” Game, You’re in Charge, and Hold Your Answer that build refusal into something safe and even fun. It’s designed so you can start today, with the people already in your learner’s life, before any formal lesson begins.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m3x4RBVEZ7pXFiaEBKVYvZqeG_yCPvU-/view?usp=sharing
