On Tuesday, April 28, 2026, the European Parliament called on the European Union to adopt a consent-based definition of rape. “No means no” needs to be replaced with “yes means yes”. This conceptual shift is grounded in trauma-informed studies that have conclusively evinced the “freeze response”: people are incapacitated in situations they perceive as threatening. They are unable or too terrorized to asserts their rights and boundaries. The transition to “yes means yes” is a welcome development. But courts all over the West have been taking it in an unwelcome and shocking direction: even affirmative and enthusiastic consent at the heat of the moment can be retroactively invalidated on multiple grounds, thus denying the consenting party all agency and criminalizing the ensuing proceedings.
Sam Vaknin (Fri,) studied this question.