LawByLak — Topic 19: Consent (OCR H418, Paper 1)

Consent

The defence that starts from a refusal. You cannot consent to actual bodily harm, and then the law spends fifty years

listing the times when you can.

31 authorities in full · 30 spec checkpoints · 41 flashcards · 6 model answers from Level 2 to Level 4 · 1 real past paper, worked · OCR’s own exemplar script, transcribed and marked

Consent is the general defence most likely to appear as an essay, and it is the one where students write the most and earn the least. The reason is almost always the same: the answer keeps describing exceptions long after it has stopped saying anything new.

What is inside

• Real consent, taken apart. Capacity, information and submission, with the four deception cases set out as a numbered sequence so you can see at a glance that three vitiate consent and one does not, and why the fourth is the trap.
• Dica and Konzani side by side, one opening the door and one closing it, with the allegation, the charge and the outcome on each.
• R v Brown in full, with the majority separated from itself and the dissent given its own space rather than buried in a final clause. Then Wilson, Emmett, Donovan and Boyea against it.
• The exceptions, and where each one stops. Sport, surgery, tattooing and branding, horseplay, and the line R v BM draws.
• Nine evaluation arguments, each with its counter, plus four reform routes argued for, against and to a verdict.
• Thirty-one authorities with a one-sentence index you can cover a column of, so “name the case from the principle” and the harder reverse both work without a hand over the screen.

The reform argument nobody else makes properly

OCR’s mark scheme calls the 1995 Law Commission document a report. It is Consultation Paper No 139; the 1994 paper is No 134; and no final report was ever published. That fact is the single strongest reform point in the topic, and it is worth more than naming two document numbers.

What we will not pretend

Consent has been examined once: June 2023, Question 7* and Question 10*, an essay worth twenty marks, AO1 8 and AO3 12, on whether the law is fit for purpose in modern times. It has never been set as a problem question, so every problem scenario here is drafted in OCR style and labelled as such. Eighteen of the thirty-one authorities carry facts that could not be verified from the sources available, and each says so on the page. Where the burden of proof has no English authority in the sources, the principle is stated and the citation is deliberately withheld rather than invented.

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