I can answer for myself that I would absolutely have walked away from at least two flights if I had known how disgustingly my body was about to be violated. But no one told me. They just walked up and sexually assaulted me.

At BWI in 2004, I had no way of knowing and certainly had no warning that I was about to be penetrated with a foreign object. If I had been warned, I would have walked away.

In Delhi, I would have walked away if I had known that a woman was about to place her fingers on my nipples and twiddle them. She did not warn me, she just did it. If I had known, I would have walked away.

The real problem is that security people surprise us with their abuse, over and over. Susie Castillo said that she assented to a patdown because in her previous patdowns she wasn't sexually violated. And then, without warning, she felt a stranger's hands on her labia and broke into tears.

Even with all the news coverage, people still don't realize or don't believe that genitals are being rubbed. I have another friend, a Ph.D. in mathematics, who was sexually assaulted by a screener after refusing a body scan. My friend said she had absolutely no idea that touching her genitals and breasts would be involved, even after getting the verbal description from the screener, and this was in February 2011 after massive media coverage. This friend spent five hours crying afterward, and re-arranged her entire life to avoid flying in the future. She would have said no if she had known.

This lying to us about what will be touched makes a mockery of the idea of "consent". We don't know what we're consenting to!