When Consent Isn’t Freely Given
A personal exploration of sexual coercion, consent, and the forms of sexual abuse that can exist within relationships — and how it can take years to recognise what you experienced for what it really was.
When Consent Isn't Freely Given
Content warning: This post discusses sexual abuse, sexual coercion, miscarriage, and medical trauma. Please read with care.
It took me years to understand the quieter forms of coercion, humiliation and survival that I had once called normal.
About a year after my last relationship ended, I remember sitting with a professional.
She asked me a question.
“Was there any sexual abuse?”
“No,” I said.
And I meant it.
Because back then, I thought sexual abuse meant r*pe.
I thought it meant being physically forced. Being attacked. Saying no and having somebody violently overpower you.
That hadn't happened to me.
So no. There hadn't been sexual abuse in my mind back then.
Except now I understand there was.
In every one of my significant relationships.
And that has been one of the hardest parts of educating myself about abuse and trauma — looking back at things I once dismissed, normalised, tolerated or simply survived and finally having the language to describe what was actually happening.
Sexual abuse isn't always violent.
Sometimes it is persistent.
Sometimes it is humiliating.
Sometimes it is somebody asking and asking and asking until saying yes feels easier — or safer — than continuing to say no.
Sometimes your body is there, but you aren't.
Sometimes you consent because you're trying to avoid the consequences of refusing.
Sometimes there isn't a freely given yes.
There is simply surrender.
My first relationship
He would come home drunk and want s*x.
And often I went along with it.
Not because I wanted it, but because it was easier. Because refusing meant grief. Aggro. Hassle. Anger.
And when I had learnt that giving somebody access to my body felt like the safest way to manage what might happen if I refused, I began to understand that what I was giving wasn't the freely given consent I once believed it was.
I didn't understand that then.
I do now.
There was humiliation too.
I remember being at a party wearing a beautiful silk halter-neck dress that I'd made myself.
He was very drunk.
He came up behind me and unclasped it.
The top fell down.
I wasn't wearing a bra, and suddenly my breasts were exposed in front of everybody.
Something that perhaps somebody else could dismiss as drunken stupidity was, for me, degrading and violating.
My body had been exposed without my permission.
And I was humiliated for somebody else's amusement.
Another relationship
This one is harder to explain because it looked completely different.
There was a dynamic around s*x that left me feeling unwanted, undesirable, and deeply confused.
If I tried to initiate intimacy, I was often rejected.
Yet when he wanted sex, there was an expectation that I would be available.
There were times when he would masturbate beside me in bed. When I asked why, he told me it helped him sleep.
I remember thinking: But I'm right here.
At times I tried harder to be desired and wanted.
Once, already feeling rejected and wondering what was wrong with me, I put on sexy underwear.
I was told, essentially, that it did nothing for him and that I looked hideous.
Those experiences weren't abusive simply because somebody didn't want s*x with me — everyone has the right to say no.
It was the wider pattern that mattered.
Sexuality became another place where I could be rejected, humiliated, and made to feel smaller.
And slowly, as happens with so many forms of abuse, I started looking at myself for the explanation.
What's wrong with me?
And then there was this relationship
This is probably the hardest one for me to write.
Looking back, I remember feeling numb during s*x quite often.
I wanted it over and finished as quickly as possible.
I didn't understand why.
There wasn't curiosity about my body or what felt good for me. There wasn't really exploration of me.
It felt as though s*x existed primarily to meet somebody else's needs.
But there were particular times that I now recognise very differently.
I had several operations. After surgery I would be bruised, stitched, bandaged, exhausted and taking extremely strong painkillers, including morphine.
And he would want s*x.
I'd say no.
I'd just had surgery.
I was sore.
I was drugged.
I was tired.
But the asking didn't necessarily stop.
There would be suggestions.
He could put pillows underneath me.
He'd prop me up.
He'd be gentle.
It would be fine.
Again and again.
Until eventually, sometimes I would give in because I wanted the pressure to stop.
There is a word I now use to understand those experiences.
Coercion.
Consent isn't supposed to be something somebody eventually extracts from you through persistence.
A reluctant “fine” after repeated pressure isn't the same thing as a freely given yes.
And then there is the memory I find hardest.
After my miscarriage and hysterectomy
I'd nearly lost my life during a miscarriage.
Afterwards, I needed a hysterectomy and vaginal reconstructive surgery because of the physical trauma that had occurred.
I was extensively stitched internally.
I joke about my “designer vagina” now — humour has always been one of the ways I've survived difficult things.
But there was nothing funny about what I was experiencing then.
I'd lost a pregnancy.
I'd nearly died.
I'd lost my uterus.
I'd undergone major surgery.
My body was recovering.
Emotionally, I was all over the place.
And s*x was still being asked for.
I didn't want it.
I wasn't ready physically.
I wasn't ready emotionally.
I wasn't ready mentally.
And nobody seemed particularly interested in asking what I needed.
About eight weeks after surgery, we attended an appointment with my consultant.
She asked whether we'd had s*x yet.
I said no.
I was still sore. I could still feel stitches. I wasn't ready.
She suggested that having s*x could help with the remaining stitches.
She couldn't possibly have known the dynamics of our relationship. But afterwards, her words seemed to become a kind of permission slip.
A green light that I had never personally given.
I remember going home that evening dreading what was coming.
That sentence alone tells me everything now.
Because he reminded me that the consultant had said we should. The permission slip.
And eventually s*x happened.
I remember the pain.
It was excruciating.
And it continued.
My pain didn't make him stop.
My fear didn't make him stop.
My reluctance didn't make him stop.
What I needed wasn't the priority.
And that is a memory I don't think I will ever forget.
Why didn't I call it sexual abuse?
Because nobody had taught me what sexual abuse could look like within a relationship.
Nobody had taught me about sexual coercion.
Nobody had explained that being married or in a relationship doesn't create permanent consent.
Nobody had explained that wearing somebody down until they give in isn't healthy sexual intimacy.
Nobody had explained that freezing, disconnecting, or going numb can be trauma responses.
Nobody had explained that sometimes survival looks like cooperating.
I thought:
Well, I didn't fight.
I eventually said yes.
We're in a relationship.
He's my husband.
It wasn't r*pe.
Therefore, it couldn't be sexual abuse.
I know differently now.
And then I realised something else — I have never felt safe enough to truly enjoy s*x
That's quite a difficult sentence for me to write.
For years I thought perhaps I simply didn't enjoy s*x very much.
Maybe that was just me.
But through understanding trauma, my nervous system, and my own experiences, I've started to see it differently.
Sexual intimacy requires vulnerability. And vulnerability is incredibly difficult when you don't feel safe.
And safety isn't simply somebody not physically hurting you.
It's emotional safety.
It's knowing you can say no without consequences.
It's knowing you can change your mind halfway through.
It's knowing that if something hurts, the other person will stop.
It's knowing that your pleasure matters too.
It's being able to laugh, communicate, explore, and say what you like or don't like something, without being ridiculed, rejected, or humiliated.
It's knowing that affection isn't conditional upon s*x.
It's knowing that your body belongs completely to you — even when you're choosing to share it with somebody you love.
When I look back at my relationships, I realise I never really had that.
And perhaps that's why so much of my experience of s*x involved disconnecting, enduring, performing, waiting for it to finish, or wondering what was wrong with me.
I wasn't experiencing intimacy from a place of safety.
My nervous system was protecting me in the only ways it knew how.
And there's something incredibly sad about realising that now.
But there's also something freeing about it too.
Because now I understand.
Consent needs to be freely given
Not obtained through fear.
Not through sulking.
Not through persistence.
Not because saying no will create an argument.
Not because somebody has asked twenty times and you desperately want them to stop asking.
Not because you're frightened of what happens if you refuse.
Not because you're married.
Not because you said yes yesterday.
Not because a doctor said your body is medically capable of s*x.
Nobody else can give consent for your body.
And being physically capable of intercourse does not mean you emotionally or psychologically want it.
That distinction matters enormously.
And yes, I've wondered about reporting it
That's another uncomfortable truth.
Once you recognise experiences as sexual abuse, another question can appear:
Should I go to the police?
Can I go to the police?
Would anybody believe me?
How do you prove something that happened behind closed doors years ago?
And then come all the other considerations.
The repercussions.
The emotional impact.
The effect on other people.
And, for me, the potential impact on my child.
I don't have an answer to those questions right now.
And I don't think I need to have one in order to speak about what happened.
Reporting and healing are two separate decisions.
Whether somebody reports sexual abuse — or doesn't — doesn't determine whether their experience was real.
For now, what matters to me is that I no longer have to minimise my experiences simply because I once didn't have the words for them.
I do now.
I understand that woman who sat with the professional now
The woman who confidently answered:
“No. There wasn't any sexual abuse.”
She wasn't lying.
She simply didn't have the language yet.
She hadn't understood what had happened to her.
She had spent years normalising things, perhaps because recognising them differently would have meant acknowledging something incredibly painful.
Writing this makes me emotional.
Not because I'm back there.
I'm not. I never will be.
But because sometimes healing means looking at your own story with knowledge you didn't have when you were living it.
And sometimes you suddenly realise just how much you survived.
This is one of those moments for me.
I deserved tenderness after losing my baby.
I deserved care when I'd nearly lost my life.
I deserved time to recover from surgery.
I deserved somebody asking, “What do you need?”
I deserved my 'no' to be enough.
Everybody does.
And perhaps somebody reading this would have answered that professional's question exactly as I did.
No. There wasn't any sexual abuse.
Maybe this post gives you language you didn't have before.
Because abuse doesn't become less real simply because you didn't recognise it while it was happening.
Sometimes understanding comes much, much later.
And sometimes finally naming it is part of taking yourself back.
Love Molly x