EXPLAINER | Undoing the yes: A forensic reading of consent

It is not that people fail to respect consent; rather, many were never properly introduced to what it actually is.

In G.R. No. 264724, the Philippine Supreme Court held Jhopet Hernandez Toralde, an adult man, guilty of raping a 14-year-old girl, despite his defense that they were romantically involved. He had threatened to leak a video of them kissing unless she submitted. 

The defense leaned heavily on the discredited “sweetheart theory” — a familiar legal maneuver suggesting of relational status that negates the possibility of rape. The Court rejected this outright, affirming consent must be given freely and cannot be manufactured by fear, emotional leverage, or relational proximity.

What reads, at surface level, as a straightforward legal clarification, in fact surfaces a deeper psychological fault line: in many cultures, consent remains framed as a static designation, conferred once and presumed ongoing, rather than a dynamic, situational expression of personal agency.

Sexual Script Theory (Gagnon & Simon, 1973) posits that most individuals do not construct their own frameworks for sexual behavior; instead, they absorb culturally inherited scripts. These narratives establish enduring archetypes: men are expected to initiate, women to resist, and consent is presumed to materialize somewhere in the blurry space between insistence and acquiescence. Decades later, this remains the dominant cognitive template across many societies.

In the Philippine case, the 14-year-old did not resist or cry for help. She complied out of fear. Law and psychology converge on this point: what occurred was not consent, but coercion masked as assent.

This script is not distinctly Filipino. It is a recurring global phenomenon:

These are not cultural footnotes. They are symptomatic of collective schema failures with real-world consequences.

Schema theory argues that individuals perceive reality through pre-existing cognitive filters, not objective reasoning. One who equates emotional investment with entitlement to intimacy will often misread hesitation as consent, and silence as affirmation.

This dynamic is intensified by the entitlement schema, particularly in cultures where masculinity is equated with control. In G.R. No. 264724, the accused exerted no physical force; instead, he leveraged emotional blackmail, concealed beneath cultural ambiguity. He counted on the blurred lines of relational intimacy to protect him. Until they no longer did.

Across jurisdictions, this misreading persists. On U.S. college campuses, men often interpret nonverbal cues: hesitation, stillness, partial engagement — as signals of consent, while women tend to rely on verbal refusal. 

The disconnect is not coincidental; it reflects gendered conditioning that valorizes male pursuit and frames refusal over decision.

In Scotland’s Jamieson v HM Advocate (1994), the accused was acquitted on the basis of an “honest belief” in the victim’s consent despite the absence of any verbal or behavioral affirmation. The court ruled that the belief need not be reasonable, only sincerely held.

These cases do not signal ambiguity; they lay bare a cognitive structure where intimacy is treated as debt, consent presumed by default, and resistance reduced to a hurdle rather than a boundary.

In trauma psychology, particularly in the work of Pete Walker and Bessel van der Kolk, the fawn response is understood as a survival reflex: faced with threat, some individuals default to appeasement over resistance. This is not volition; it is auto-pilot submission, misread as consent.

In G.R. No. 264724, the girl’s “agreement” emerged only under threat. Less a choice than a capitulation. Her response mirrors what van der Kolk defines as dissociative submission, where survival supersedes autonomy. 

The law is starting to recognize this. In Canada v. Ewanchuk (1999), the Supreme Court struck down “implied consent” as a legal fiction — affirming that submission under pressure is not equivalent to agreement, but its erasure.

The Philippine Supreme Court’s rejection of the sweetheart theory fits this shift: proximity does not confer permission, and fear does not constitute a yes.

Legal systems now codify affirmative consent standards: explicit, enthusiastic, ongoing. Yet culturally, many remain tethered to obsolete paradigms: where a past “yes” is treated as perpetual license, and refusal must be performative to count.

True consent is not defined by the absence of refusal, but by the presence of conditions that make refusal possible.

Authentic consent demands:

Most of the world still encourages people, especially women, to be amenable, non-confrontational, and emotionally available. In this setup, saying “yes” often means: “I didn’t feel like I could say no.”

The Philippine Supreme Court’s ruling does more than rectify a legal flaw. it confronts a collective cognitive distortion: that emotional intimacy grants sexual access, that romantic history dissolves autonomy, that love can excuse coercion.

But around the world, courts, schools, families, and partners still operate under an outdated premise:

These are not just semantic missteps; they are psychological frameworks. Until law, education, and media dismantle them, they will continue to produce silence where refusal belongs, and ambiguity where clarity is owed.

Consent is not a feeling. Not a reward. Not a debt owed in affection.

It is a present-tense, revocable, psychologically grounded act of will. Anything short of that is not intimacy.

It is compliance.

And until psychology coheres with law, these myths will persist: rebranded in euphemism, legitimized in courtrooms, and rehearsed in bedrooms.