Chanel Contos teams up with Tinder on ‘crucial’ Australian consent course, but some have doubts

Contos and peak body The Women’s Services Network hope it will introduce ‘nuances of consent’ to dating app users, but one expert says Tinder should not receive ‘props for the basics

Dating app Tinder has launched a new consent course in Australia, created in collaboration with sexual consent activist Chanel Contos and The Women’s Services Network, the national peak body for domestic and family violence services.

The course is only available on Tinder’s School of Swipe website, however, and not accessible via the app, though it will be promoted to users there from next week.

Despite this, Dr Rachael Burgin, a criminology lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology and the CEO of Rape and Sexual Assault Research and Advocacy, a charity combating sexual violence, believes the course “will not be widely used”.

She said that sexual offenders, whom interventions need to be targeted at, offend “regardless of consent education”.

According to Burgin, focusing interventions on consent awareness feeds the incorrect idea of sexual violence as a miscommunication or an accident.

“Offenders do so because they feel entitled to another person’s body, and they feel entitled to make a decision about that other person’s sexual autonomy and strip them of their sexual autonomy,” she said.

Contos, who founded Teach Us Consent, a not-for-profit organisation that campaigns for better sexual education, said consent is a “crucial topic in dating that tends to be poorly understood”.

She told Guardian Australia she hoped the course – which teaches the basics of consent, how to practically apply it and how to deal with breaches – would help both new and experienced dating app users “touch up on information” and “get into the nuances of consent”.

The Tinder website also features other consent education resources, such as the “Consent Edition” of its dating dictionary, also created in collaboration with Contos.

“We must provide clear, practical guidance on how to ask for, give and revoke consent, accept rejection, and educate on the basics of permission and boundaries as well as the more nuanced aspects of consent,” Contos said.

Karen Bentley, the CEO of the Women’s Services Network, said she was “really proud” Tinder had collaborated with sexual and domestic violence experts.

“We need to get consent education to as many places as possible.”

Burgin agreed the course was a good first step, but insisted the community “can’t be giving Tinder props for the basics”.

She called for dating apps to act more decisively.