Published on: August 11, 2025
Part Three of the TNG@25 Anniversary Blog Series By: Brett A. Sokolow, J.D., Chair, TNG Consulting
Throughout the remainder of 2025, we’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversary of TNG’s service to the education field, with blogs that commemorate our accomplishments and the people who have helped support our mission along the way. This third installment of our blog series highlights one of our most important accomplishments: popularizing and explaining the concept of consent as a basis for resolving sexual violence complaints.
After a college girlfriend was sexually assaulted, I wanted to contribute in whatever way I could to preventing sexual violence. I helped found a peer education student organization at the College of William & Mary, which would teach students about a newfangled concept called consent. Most college policies at the time, and most statutes criminalizing sexual violence, were framed in terms of force and resistance.
As the first generation of students to begin operationalizing and popularizing consent, we had a sense that it offered a more cogent framework than the obsolete concepts of force and resistance, which were rooted in patriarchy, male privilege, and legalisms, rather than humanisms. We taught our peers about consent and watched with surprise as peers on other campuses did as well. We didn’t have social media, but when the right time comes for the right idea, it will spread, and people will recognize its significance. Consent was a grassroots movement, and college students were the fertilizer.
Most students who engage in peer education don’t persist at it after college. I chose a different path. Most of you in the education field know me as the leader of TNG Consulting, a founder of ATIXA and NABITA, and as a civil rights lawyer and Title IX expert. Many of you don’t know that this is my second career.
After graduating from William & Mary, I attended law school. In law school, I had the opportunity to become a keynote speaker, and I went on the road to teach college students about consent. Every night, I presented on a different college campus. I taught about consent. I taught about how alcohol impacted consent. We drew thousands of students into thoughtful and meaningful conversations. I think we raised awareness, catalyzed prevention, and elevated consent to the center of campus discourse on sexual violence. Law and policy embraced consent. Force and resistance were banished.
The work caught on. I presented on more than 160 college campuses a year. I racked up millions of frequent flyer miles. Many others did the same thing, visiting schools and colleges around the country to promote consent. I traveled nonstop from 1997 until 2012. I visited more than 2,000 colleges and schools. Then, I stopped. My kids were young, and my work growing ATIXA and NABITA demanded more of my time. It was time to get off the road as a speaker to student audiences at schools and colleges. I reinvented myself as a consultant. I still miss engaging with students. My favorite visits were those where colleges would set up small-group breakout sessions after the speech, and I could meet with students in small groups to digest the talk, expand on it, and inspire the next generation of consent activists.
It’s odd to look back on that time now and tell my own kids, who are both now college students, that the consent concepts that they grew up with have not always been around. That they were not always embraced. That they were controversial. Those of us doing the work on the frontlines of campuses were young and brash. We never doubted that consent would become the currency of sexual interactions, but that’s just because we were naïve. It’s a transformative concept, but its adoption and acceptance were never a fait accompli. We had the notion that we were part of something larger than ourselves. A movement. A Zeitgeist. An idea whose time had come. But, when you’re in the middle of the work, it’s sometimes hard to see the progress, and having faith in the inevitability of something doesn’t always make it so. In this case, it did.
Millions of school students and college students have benefited from our activism. They have come of age in a time that recognizes and respects their sexual autonomy more than it has ever been respected in history. College policy reform grew upward like a vine, leading to reforms in both civil and criminal law. Now, federal regulations under Title IX expect all schools and colleges to develop and implement consent-based policies.
Twenty-five years in, I’ve matured in the work. From helping to popularize consent, I’ve transitioned to being one of its interpreters. The work that we’ve done has led to widespread adoption of ATIXA’s consent construct, now implemented by thousands of schools and colleges across the country. We’ve helped the education field create and operationalize transparent policies that define consent, that recognize the complexity of consent, that understand that consent isn’t always valid, and that there are factors that can mitigate consent (such as threats, coercion, or alcohol). We use our consent construct to demonstrate how consent is communicated, what cannot be considered consent, and how consent can be withdrawn. We teach advanced concepts such as ratification and reciprocation, and how consent works in BDSM relationships. These understandings are an important part of our contribution as an organization, and their widespread adoption throughout our field speaks to the validity and quality of the work we have published and publicized.
Consent was a tough sell a generation ago. Now, everyone accepts the radical notion that every one of us has a right not to be subject to sexual contact unless and until we indicate, through clear word or action, our permission to do so. What was once radical has become part of the fabric of a society that strives for sexual justice. We’ve been a small part of that project, and it has created an enduring legacy, paving the way for future generations to redefine, re-envision, and re-imagine what consent means to them, or even what lies beyond it. Their work builds upon ours, just as ours builds upon the work of early feminists and activists before us.
Join us in shaping the next 25 years of safer, stronger education. Learn more at www.tngconsulting.com.