The Impossible Trinity of Deception,Sex and Consent

Abstract

During the last couple of centuries, the English law dealing with sexual conduct has made a decisive shift towards a ‘consent-based model’ of rape law. But strikingly, deceptive sexual relationships (DSR) have been untouched by this development as lately reaffirmed by the Court of Appeal in R v Jason Lawrence. If rape is defined as sex without consent, then DSR ought to be no exception, because the general proposition of law is that consent induced by deception is no consent at all. In making a case for the criminalisation of DSR, this article (1) arrays the lack of uniformity in court’s jurisprudence on DSR and (2) brings along the sexual autonomy theory to support its case.