Dating app Tinder has launched a new consent course in Australia, created in collaboration with sexual consent activist Chanel Contos and The Women’s Services Network, the national peak body for domestic and family violence services.
The course is only available on Tinder’s School of Swipe website, however, and not accessible via the app, though it will be promoted to users there from next week.
Despite this, Dr Rachael Burgin, a criminology lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology and the CEO of Rape and Sexual Assault Research and Advocacy, a charity combating sexual violence, believes the course “will not be widely used”.
She said that sexual offenders, whom interventions need to be targeted at, offend “regardless of consent education”.
According to Burgin, focusing interventions on consent awareness feeds the incorrect idea of sexual violence as a miscommunication or an accident.
“Offenders do so because they feel entitled to another person’s body, and they feel entitled to make a decision about that other person’s sexual autonomy and strip them of their sexual autonomy,” she said.
Contos, who founded Teach Us Consent, a not-for-profit organisation that campaigns for better sexual education, said consent is a “crucial topic in dating that tends to be poorly understood”.
She told Guardian Australia she hoped the course – which teaches the basics of consent, how to practically apply it and how to deal with breaches – would help both new and experienced dating app users “touch up on information” and “get into the nuances of consent”.
The Tinder website also features other consent education resources, such as the “Consent Edition” of its dating dictionary, also created in collaboration with Contos.
“We must provide clear, practical guidance on how to ask for, give and revoke consent, accept rejection, and educate on the basics of permission and boundaries as well as the more nuanced aspects of consent,” Contos said.
Karen Bentley, the CEO of the Women’s Services Network, said she was “really proud” Tinder had collaborated with sexual and domestic violence experts.
“We need to get consent education to as many places as possible.”
Burgin agreed the course was a good first step, but insisted the community “can’t be giving Tinder props for the basics”.
She called for dating apps to act more decisively.
“They can ban people from the app … they can share information with law enforcement agencies when things happen … they can ensure that people are not able to just unmatch someone or delete their account and evade responsibility,” Burgin said.
“These are the things we know happen.”
Tinder users in the ACT currently receive in-app advertising around the territory’s positive consent laws.
The course launch follows a study by the app and YouGov, where a third of respondents said they knew “little or nothing” about consent, and just over one in four believed they know “little to nothing” about their state’s specific consent laws.
Additionally, 25% of respondents were unsure of the legality of stealthing – the non-consensual removal of a condom during sex – or believed it was a consensual activity. Stealthing is illegal in Tasmania, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and the ACT, and will be illegal in Queensland in 2025.
Despite 55% of gen Z and millennial dating app users claiming they know “very well” what consent is, 79% of respondents said they felt pressure to conform to a partner’s intimate interests, with 18% stating they often felt this pressure.
Almost a fifth of Australians have used Tinder, a survey conducted by YouGov found.
Tinder said that based on previous education initiatives, it was “confident” the course would be taken up. A spokesperson for the app on Friday said there were “plans to ensure it will be accessible in-app in the future”.
“We know that safety is complex and nuanced and reducing violence is something that requires multi-stakeholder engagement and work,” the spokesperson said.
“As part of our broader industry-leading efforts, we are committed to helping ensure that we are sharing relevant and engaging resources with our users, as well as with non-users and key stakeholders.”
This article was amended on 13 September 2024 to correct the spelling of Dr Rachael Burgin’s name.
