Online Workshop: Building Capacity to Consent: Balancing Safety with Sexual Rights

Workshop Summary

We often ask whether someone with I/DD can give consent. We rarely ask what we can do to help them get there. That shift — from gatekeeping to capacity-building — is what this workshop is about.

Note: This is a pre-recorded, 90-minute, online workshop. You’ll receive Instant access upon purchase — including three downloadable resources.

Why This Workshop Exists

Bill Taverner began his career not as a sexuality educator but as a group home manager in Brooklyn and Staten Island in the early 1990s. Some of the people he supported had recently left Willowbrook — the New York institution where people with I/DD were subjected to what he describes as “appalling conditions” and denied their basic human rights. Seeing people navigate life after institutionalization left a permanent mark on his work.

That work eventually shifted entirely to sexuality education. But the questions he encountered in those group homes — about privacy, about rights, about who gets to make decisions about someone else’s body and sexual expression — never left him. They became the foundation of a career spent thinking seriously about how we assess and build capacity to consent.

This workshop reflects that career. Bill brings together the major frameworks for understanding sexual consent — including the tool he co-developed, the Verbal Informed Sexual Consent Assessment Tool (VISCAT) — and uses them to ask a harder question: not just whether someone can consent, but what we as educators and supporters can do to help build that capacity over time.

The Problem with Pass/Fail

Most conversations about consent in disability services treat it as a threshold. Can this person consent or not? The answer determines what they are allowed to do.

Bill’s argument — and this workshop’s central premise — is that this framing is both inaccurate and unfair.

“We hold folks with intellectual disabilities to a higher standard. And, you know, we create a series of checkboxes that we don’t apply to our daily lives.”

— Bill Taverner, MA, CSE, workshop presenter

Consent is not binary. It is not static. The ability to give meaningful consent shifts with age, experience, relationship, emotional state, and circumstances — for everyone. What we need is not a yes/no determination, but a map of where someone is on the continuum and a plan to help them grow.

“We always need to be thinking about how to help move a person along the continuum — thinking of the ability to consent to not consent as a continuum where people aren’t necessarily at one end or the other, but we’re always moving along the continuum.”

— Bill Taverner

And moving people along that continuum is our job. Education, counseling, skills training, and thoughtful program planning can all build consent capacity. The question is whether we are doing that work — or simply locking the door.

Sexual Rights and Where We Fall Short

Consent doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists inside a set of rights that belong to every person, including people with I/DD.

This workshop examines the World Association for Sexual Health’s Declaration of Sexual Rights — sixteen rights that cover everything from autonomy and bodily integrity to privacy, education, and the right to form relationships. Participants work through each right together and consider: is this typically affirmed or denied for people with I/DD?

The results are sobering. Rights to autonomy, to privacy, to decide whether to have children, to access information — most of them are being denied to most people with I/DD in most service settings. Not because providers are malicious, but because the systems around them were not built with these rights in mind.

“For all the progress that has been made in sex education since the 1970s, for folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities, look at how far we still have to go.”

— Bill Taverner

The workshop also addresses guardianship — one of the most common places where rights are confused with restrictions. Legal guardianship gives guardians duties and authorities, not rights. It does not automatically remove a person’s right to learn, to grow, or to express their sexuality. Understanding that distinction matters for every educator and support professional in this field.

The Models

A significant portion of this workshop is a guided comparison of the major frameworks for understanding sexual consent. Bill reviews each one — its strengths, its limitations, and how it translates to work with people with I/DD — and helps participants think through which tools best fit their context.

The frameworks covered include:

• VISCAT (Verbal Informed Sexual Consent Assessment Tool) — developed by Bill Taverner and Christopher DeMarco, originally in partnership with YAI and the New York State Office on Disabilities. Built around five criteria: awareness, understanding of health consequences, understanding of appropriate time and place, understanding of legal boundaries, and the ability to avoid exploitation and harm.
• The Tea Analogy — a widely used model that uses the decision to have a cup of tea as a stand-in for sexual consent, making abstract principles concrete and memorable.
• I’m SAFE — a model from “Professor Sex” that adapts the tea analogy into an acronym: Specific, Awake, Freely given, and Enthusiastic.
• FRIES (Planned Parenthood) — Freely given, Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic, Specific. One of the most widely adopted models in sexuality education.
• Unequal Partners — an adaptation of the VISCAT developed for the teaching resource Unequal Partners: Teaching About Power, Consent, and Healthy Relationships, with simplified language and approximately 50 lesson plans for direct instruction.
• COW — Consent is Active, Coherent, Ongoing, and Willing.

These models are then applied to a series of case study scenarios — real situations involving real decisions about consent — so participants practice using the frameworks rather than just knowing them.

Who This Workshop Is For

This workshop is for self-advocates who want to understand their own rights and what consent means, and for the educators, direct support professionals, school staff, agency trainers, residential program staff, therapists, and family members who support people with I/DD. It is especially relevant if you work in settings where consent policies are unclear, where guardianship creates friction, or where you want to move beyond assessment and toward active capacity-building. No prior background in consent frameworks is required.

What You Will Learn

By the end of this 90-minute workshop, you will be able to:

Evaluate multiple models for assessing sexual consent capacity — including VISCAT, FRIES, the Tea Analogy, and Unequal Partners — and identify which tools are best suited to your work

Apply consent criteria to real scenarios involving sexual decision-making, using a continuum rather than a pass/fail framework

Examine the World Association for Sexual Health’s Declaration of Sexual Rights and identify where people with I/DD are most often denied those rights in service settings

Understand the role and limits of guardianship in relation to a person’s right to learn and grow sexually

Identify strategies — including education, counseling, skills training, and program planning — for actively building a person’s consent capacity over time

The workshop also covers teaching people to type — the communication support that removes all limits. As Molly puts it: “Once you give someone access to an entire keyboard, the sky’s the limit. They have the same amount of communication as the rest of us.”

Workshop Presenters

Bill Taverner, MA, CSE, is the chief editor of the American Journal of Sexuality Education, the author or editor of more than 75 publications related to sexuality education, including Verbal Informed Sexual Consent Assessment Tool, and the founder of the Sex Ed Lecture Series.

Katherine McLaughlin, M.Ed., AASECT Certified Sexuality Educator, is the Founder, CEO, and Lead Trainer for Elevatus Training. She has been a sexuality educator and trainer for over 30 years. As a national expert on sexuality and intellectual and developmental disabilities, she trains professionals and parents, as well as people with I/DD, to become sexual self-advocates and peer sexuality educators.⁠