Chanel Contos on Empathy, Being in the Public Eye and the Power and Pitfalls of Social Media

In February 2021, university student Chanel Contos posted a poll on Instagram: “Have you or has anyone close to you ever been sexually assaulted by someone who went to an all-boys school in Sydney?” The post went viral and more than 200 people responded “yes”. Contos mobilised the momentum. She launched a petition calling for an earlier start to sex and consent education in schools that eventually amassed 44,000 signatures. More than 6600 people shared their own stories of sexual assault with Contos, which she then gave to parliament as evidence of a consent crisis.

Contos has since parlayed that petition and poll into a movement, Teach Us Consent. Her advocacy has resulted in age-appropriate consent education being mandated in schools in every Australian state and territory from foundation to year 10. And she’s worked alongside the federal government to implement a national consent framework that outlines a specific definition of sexual consent. In September 2023 she released a book, Consent Laid Bare, which gives young women the vocabulary, advice and tools to use if their boundaries have been breached, and before that point. More recently, Teach Us Consent has made inroads into the consent education space in the US. It launched a newsletter led by two New York-based writers who have commissioned a slew of local experts to write features about the topic. Contos is often mentioned in the same breath as fellow high-profile advocates such as Grace Tame, and is roundly admired for her common-sense, empathetic approach to consent and sexual education.

“It can be quite weird when I’m in Australia sometimes, because I live here [in London], so I don’t think of myself having a public profile,” she tells Broadsheet. Contos has lived in London for four years, and when I visit her flat she’s part way through packing to move to Oxford to study a masters in public policy. “But then [I] go back to Australia and people are like, ‘Oh my god’, at random restaurants, which is really sweet.”

Consent, of course, doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it’s part of a larger series of issues ranging from sexism to the language we use when talking about other genders and societal expectations. Much of that discourse, good and bad, rages on social media, and is particularly harmful for young people. Contos recently addressed the government’s social media age ban in an opinion piece for the Guardian, where she endorsed the ban while acknowledging social media’s benefits (it was the start of the work she does now). The pitfalls of social media as she sees it are the harms of algorithms, the growth of “incel” communities and the impacts the polarisation and tunnel vision intrinsic to the social media experience has on malleable young minds.

“I was really internally torn [about the ban], but I do see advantages and disadvantages of social media,” says Contos, who speaks enthusiastically about the democratisation of news thanks to social media and how language is evolving on apps like Tiktok. She does this while showing me how she’s changed her screen to black and white to deter too much scrolling. “But for me, and the current state [of social media], the disadvantages really do outweigh the advantages. I’m against bans as a concept, so it was hard to overall take the ‘I-support-this side’, but I tried really hard to get into the nuances of algorithms and the damage that’s doing. We think how the algorithm tells us how to think these days – I honestly think we’ve regressed in media literacy.

“I don’t for a second think that under-16-year-olds are now not going to access social media anymore. I just think it will hopefully put social media companies on notice and make parents feel comfortable to put restrictions [on what their kids are accessing].”

Contos has seen first-hand an increase in young people’s understanding of consent. But she says trying to tackle all the ways in which it might be breached can be like playing whack-a-mole. The students she talks to in schools have a solid grounding in the meaning of consent, but are increasingly concerned about how deepfakes and AI can take away their bodily autonomy. To counter the constantly evolving technology, she says empathy and respect must be at the heart of everything: if they are the core principles people are operating under, there will be less of a need to adapt and change to every new issue or technology.

She also mentions “entitled opportunists” – people who don’t necessarily set out to cause harm, but who coerce or otherwise force another person into a sexual situation without their consent and are often unaware of the consequences of their actions.

“I think a lot of that perpetration can happen out of a misunderstanding and ignorance, and sexual entitlement and low empathy, particularly towards women and other minorities,” she says. It’s this group that’s one of the main targets of her new partnership with Tinder: a consent course to improve consent education and make it accessible and applicable to both on- and offline interactions.

It comes after a surprising (but not that surprising) new study by the dating app. Just 55 per cent of gen Z and millennial users of dating apps in Australia respond “very well” when asked if they knew what consent is. A further 28 per cent say they know “something”, and 17 per cent know “little or nothing” about consent. Just 32 per cent are confident they knew their state’s consent laws “very well”, and 79 per cent had felt pressure to go along with their partner’s “intimate interests”. One quarter of respondents mistakenly believe stealthing is consensual.

The consent course, which is available on Tinder’s School of Swipe microsite, is an interactive platform. It starts with the basics of consent and its key terms, and shares tips for how to approach consent and boundaries in real life. It also has advice on how to find support if your consent has been violated. Contos used the Australian Government’s consent policy (which she helped develop) to inform the definitions, and interspersed throughout are quizzes and videos starring Contos and podcasters The Relatables offering advice.

“There are infinite ways in which consent can be expressed or denied, which means it’s very hard to teach in a black-and-white way, and that can make it feel complicated,” says Contos about the Tinder course, and teaching consent in general. “But in reality it’s actually really simple if you think about it as just a singular human interaction. If you’re being empathetic in a sexual situation, you’re never going to violate someone’s consent. I think centering empathy in those situations gets rid of the fact that there’s infinite possibilities of how it could go, because then you’re just always going to be on the right track.”