our campaign

We Can’t Consent to This was a response to the increasing numbers of women and girls killed and injured in violence that is claimed to be consensual, and a culture of normalisation of violence against women. Set up in December 2018 by Fiona Mackenzie (later awarded an MBE for this work), it intially responded to the killing of a woman called Natalie Connolly, whose partner had subjected her to a terrible assault. He claimed this violence was consensual, was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter, and sentenced to 3 years and 8 months in prison. He was released before the We Can’t Consent to This campaign had won legal change.

The campaign was a group of women from a range of backgrounds, strangers to each other before this. All volunteered to work to change outcomes for women. Some of us had been directly affected by this violence - having been subjected to violence or seen friends assaulted or killed. All of us were motivated to make change. You can read more here.

The campaign won legal change in England and Wales when the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 codified the law that you cannot consent to serious injury, pausing several decades of campaigning in the other direction, even by organisations like the Law Commissions of England and Wales and Scotland who sought to ‘liberalise’ the law. In 2021 we also won a new offence of non fatal strangulation in response to the staggering scale of women subjected to this violence in sex and domestic abuse.

We published research which brings together women’s stories and clear data to support real life change. We found that millions of women were being subjected to violent assault in sex- by men inspired by porn. We found that criminal justice systems foundered when men claimed a woman consented to violence: not just in the UK nations. We found that women, if they could speak in these cases, always said they did not consent. You can read that research below.

And the We Can’t Consent to This campaign worked. Since April 2021, women have been killed by men who have tried to claim she consented to the violence. Those men have been prosecuted for murder, convicted, and given long sentences. There is of course more to do.

Although the campaign ended in 2021, we do occasional work to push for further change. For instance in 2025 we intervened in a case won at the European Court of Human Rights which found that France had failed to investigate non consensual violence, and was wrong to rely on a BDSM contract in deciding a woman had consented to later violent assault. And 5 years on from our campaign, we see the same headlines with the horrifying scale of violence done to women in sex. Our response with The Other Half is to demand we finally do something about the scale of this harm. These same issues affect all developed nations: we won’t be acting alone.

The campaign information is maintained here as a record of our research and to inspire others. It costs money to maintain this site - please consider donating to our sister think tank The Other Half to keep this work alive.

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