This post features a short clip from my time as a 2025 Carrie Buck Fellow at Brandeis University, through the Carrie Buck Fellowship at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy. The clip comes from a live conversation with Rebecca Cokley, where I am asked a deceptively simple question: Why is Consent so Radical?
What follows is my response. It draws from disability justice, public health, and lived experience, and it centers a truth we often avoid naming. Consent is not just about sex. It is about power, autonomy, and whether we recognize full personhood from the very beginning of life.
People hear the word consent and immediately think sex or sexuality in the bedroom, something that happens behind closed doors between consenting adults. But consent is bigger than that. Consent shows up in every interaction. Any time we engage with another person, we are either upholding their autonomy or we are taking it away.
That is why consent can feel radical. It disrupts everyday power structures that are so normalized we rarely question them, especially the ones rooted in how adults relate to children. Childism is real in our society. When children are expected to comply, to be touched, redirected, moved, or corrected without choice, we are teaching them something very specific about their bodies and boundaries. We are teaching them that their agency is conditional.
This is the quote I referenced in the clip, the one I could not remember in the moment but keep returning to:
“Every hierarchy, every abuse, every act of domination that seeks to justify or excuse itself appeals through analogy to the rule of adults over children. The suppression of our agency, the dismissal of our desires, the reduction of our personhood. At its root lies our dehumanization of children.”
If we want people to have healthier relationships across their lifetime, we cannot wait until adulthood to introduce consent language. Consent must be taught as a daily, relational practice from a young age. This includes blind students and Blind and Disabled students, who are too often denied bodily autonomy in the name of safety, help, or compliance. Consent is not extra. It is a core life skill.
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Video Context
Title: Carrie Buck Snippet 2.mp4
Date: Saturday, February 7, 2026
Event: Carrie Buck Fellowship, Brandeis University
Author: Lurie Institute for Disability Policy
Video URL: https://youtube.com/shorts/GKI0By99atI?si=N2XY3dEkArKSo56p
Visual description: Video of Laura Millar speaking at the Carrie Buck Fellowship event at Brandeis University, with an ASL interpreter visible below her. On-screen text reads: “Every hierarchy of power starts with an analogy of childism, this rule of adults over children. But I feel like if we give children the consent language, we can equip them for better relationships for their entire life.”
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Transcript
Laura Millar (question): Why consent is so radical.
Rebecca Cokley: Yeah.
Laura Millar: I think because people just hear consent and they think sex and they think sexuality in the bedroom and that’s a conversation that happens behind closed doors and between consenting adults and they don’t realize how it’s in every interaction. You are either upholding somebody’s autonomy or you’re taking it away if you’re interacting with somebody. And so if we don’t start having consent in everyday conversations, if we don’t let our children know from a very, very young age that they have the right to say no, it gets so much harder as they go. Why is it so radical?
We’re also not used to giving children power. Childism is very real in our society. I have a favorite quote about it, but I’m not going to remember it off the top of my head, but it’s basically every hierarchy of power starts with an analogy of childism, this rule of adults over children. But I feel like if we give children the consent language, we can equip them for better relationships for their entire life.
And I will give just one example. I am a mother. He’s now 18. He also curates my stories very carefully. So if I tell any stories about him, it has been approved. [laughter] He was in fourth grade and kept stepping out of line and the chaperone kept pushing him back into line and he kept saying, “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me,” rather assertively. And the chaperone said to him, “Say please don’t touch me.” And my son turned around and said, “I shouldn’t have to say please. You shouldn’t be touching me.” At that point, the chaperones told him to stop sassing and that he was going to talk to his mother about it. And so the first thing my kid does [laughter] is come home and make sure that he wasn’t in the wrong and that he was asserting himself. I don’t think they’re too young. I don’t think there’s an age where something like that isn’t appropriate.
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Invitation to Learn More
If this resonates and you are thinking, Okay, but what does this actually look like at home, in a classroom, or in a disability services setting, this is the work I do.
I work with parents, teachers, administrators, and Blind and Disabled adults who want consent to be more than a buzzword. Together, we translate consent into everyday practice: how we ask, how we touch, how we offer support, how we teach independence, and how we repair harm when we get it wrong.
If you want to learn more about training, consultation, or speaking, visit www.lauramillar.com.