Dignity-Based Consent and Coercive Intimacy: Suppression of Intimacy, Post-Coercive Vulnerability, and the "Sleeping With the Enemy" Paradigm

This article advances a dignity-based theory of consent to address a persistent blind spot in the legal recognition of coercive control within intimate relationships. Drawing on international frameworks that recognise coerced marriage, trafficking, and sexual exploitation as violations of human dignity, the article argues that consent obtained through emotional domination, psychological punishment, or threat of continued harm is invalid regardless of gender or relationship status. Introducing the “sleeping with the enemy” paradigm, the article demonstrates how intimacy itself can function as a mechanism of coercion, collapsing evidentiary distance and sustaining exploitation through vulnerability rather than force. It further examines the post-coercive suppression of genuine intimacy, showing how coercion distorts not only consent in the moment, but the future capacity for autonomous relational engagement. The analysis explains why victims may remain suspended between exit and re-entanglement, how premature relational substitution can dilute insight and prolong vulnerability, and how perpetrators may weaponise residual intimacy suppression to maintain control beyond formal separation. By integrating dignity into consent analysis, the article bridges international human-rights law and domestic coercive-control jurisprudence, offering a framework capable of recognising intimate exploitation as a temporally extended violation of autonomy and human dignity.