A bill seeking to clarify Vermont’s definition of consent began to fall apart Friday morning in the Senate Committee on Judiciary.
H.183 would have made it clear that people who are unconscious or substantially impaired by drugs or alcohol cannot consent to sex. It would also require data collection around the reporting of sexual violence, establish an Intercollegiate Sexual Violence Prevention Council and fund an expansion of medical care for sexual assault patients.
However, it’s unclear whether the bill will even make it out of committee.
After just a few minutes of discussion around the best language to use to redefine consent in Vermont, Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, trailed off mid-sentence, “to be honest with you, I’m fried,” he said.
He wasn’t alone.
“It’s not unusual for the House to put us in a position where we get things that are controversial or tough to deal with, and we have no time left,” said Sen. Phil Baruth, D-Chittenden. “So I feel like this bill needs more work.”
Sarah Robinson, deputy director with the Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, offered a solution to that fatigue: The committee could keep the bulk of the bill intact, but scrap the discussion around consent for now. Then, over the summer, a small group could work on the particularities around the definition of consent and bring back proposed language next session.
“The network would certainly be supportive of that, but we do believe the other sections of the bill are important and timely, and we certainly wouldn’t want to see those not be able to move forward,” Robinson said.
Baruth countered with a solution of his own: keeping the $40,000 for forensic nursing in the budget and walking away from the rest, at least until next session. In particular, Baruth spoke up in favor of jettisoning a provision that would have established an Intercollegiate Sexual Violence Prevention Council.
“To be very honest, I don’t support the prevention council,” Baruth said. “It’s a seven-year council with a large number of people, and what it’s tasked with doing is, in essence, meeting and sharing best practices, which they can all do now. So I don’t know how obligating the state for seven years to pay for that process makes any sense.”
Lawmakers in the House, who introduced and have advocated for the legislation, said they were “stunned” to see the turn Friday’s conversation took.
“It is hard for me to understand how it seems to go unregistered that we have a problem with people who have been raped while under the influence being able to find justice in our system,” said Rep. Sarah Copeland Hanzas, who introduced the bill. “And so it is a little bit perplexing to me that I’m hearing conversations in committee that make it look like we’re not recognizing it as a problem.”
She said she understands exactly how exhausting this point in the legislative session can be but that she hopes the committee can find their way back to the fundamental idea that this bill matters — as does when it gets passed.
“I guess it depends on whether we think it’s important for the survivor who is raped tomorrow or next month or in August to go unrecognized, and to continue to see a lack of justice,” Copeland Hanzas said.
Testimony from prosecutors, she said, has made it “pretty clear” strengthening the language of Vermont’s consent laws would help them prosecute more of the cases that are currently going unaddressed.
Speaker of the House Jill Krowinski said she thinks it’s critical for action to be taken on the legislation but also understands lawmakers need to get it right.
“I think that our House committees did incredibly great work in crafting this bill, and so while I have some concerns about them changing some of the language, I need to better understand why they’re making those changes, I haven’t heard their rationale for why they think change is needed,” Krowinski said.
Friday’s discussion wasn’t the first time lawmakers have struggled with their support of the bill. Last week, most of the members of the Senate judiciary committee raised concerns about the semantics of the consent language, wondering exactly how explicit consent would have to be under the new law and whether the bill was going too far.
Sen. Joe Benning, R- Caledonia, said at the time that he “gets a little queasy” thinking about the idea of a longstanding married couple who are in bed together, and one partner is interested in having sex, hoping that the other partner “will wake up and be willing.”
“As I read this bill with that language, we’re creating a crime out of that situation,” Benning said.
Copeland Hanzas said that kind of talk about “unintended consequences” is a little offensive and a big distraction from the issues at the center of the legislation.
“If we’re going to use those sort of out-of-left-field scenarios to suggest that we shouldn’t help [rape victims] … that leaves me with a lot of frustration,” she said. “I guess I would hope that they can set aside some of the intentional muddying of the waters and really come back to the essence of what we’re trying to do here, which is to give an avenue to justice for survivors of sexual assault.”
The committee will take up a redraft of the bill next Wednesday.
“This thing is no slam dunk,” Sears said. “We’re just looking at what this committee can possibly do to get a bill out.”
