MADRID — A Spanish court on Thursday sentenced five men to prison terms in the sexual assault of an unconscious 14-year old girl, but the men were convicted on a lesser charge of sexual abuse after the court ruled that they did not use violence during the attack.
The verdict is likely to intensify the debate over whether the country’s judiciary treats victims of sexual attacks fairly, coming after a 2018 court verdict in a gang rape in Pamplona had roiled the nation. Those men were later subjected to harsher punishment amid vows of judicial reform.
But Thursday’s ruling, which echoed the initial Pamplona verdict, prompted women to take to social media again to express their outrage and call for protests.
Ada Colau, the mayor of Barcelona, wrote on Twitter that the “shocking” verdict was the product of a patriarchal judiciary. “I’m not a judge and I don’t know how many years in prison they deserve, but what I know is that this is not abuse, it is rape!” the mayor wrote.
The attack took place three years ago in Manresa, a town in the northeastern region of Catalonia, and seven men went on trial last July in Barcelona.
On Thursday, the court sentenced five of them to 10 to 12 years each in prison for sexual abuse without aggression. The judges decided that the attackers did not have to use violence or intimidation because the girl had been drunk and might have used drugs before the assault, leaving her “in a state of unconsciousness, without knowing what she was doing or not doing.”
A sixth defendant was found not to have been involved in the assault, and a seventh was cleared after initially being charged with failing to help her.
The Manresa trial began weeks after the Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling, overturned the verdict of a lower court in the Pamplona case, in which an 18-year-old woman was gang raped during the running of the bulls.
The lower court had found those five defendants guilty of a lesser charge of sexual abuse and sentenced them to nine years in prison, setting off a public outcry. In June the Supreme Court sentenced them instead to 15 years for rape, and emphasized the victim’s lack of consent.
The latest trial has renewed a bitter public debate, and the police had to intervene to prevent a relative of the young victim from assaulting one of the defendants outside the courtroom.
Public prosecutors initially recommended that the men be found guilty of sexual abuse rather than rape because the teenage victim had been drunk, had possibly taken drugs and, they said, did not oppose the attack. But they later toughened the charges after hearing testimony from the victim.
The victim told the court that although she could not recall every detail of the assault, she had flashbacks about the attack. She also said that she felt intimated and fearful because the men appeared to have a gun. (It turned out to be a fake.)
The assault took place in an abandoned building during an outdoor party in Manresa in October 2016. The men said they had seen the victim at the party, and one persuaded her to accompany him into the building. The men said that they had drunk alcohol and smoked marijuana at the party. The court found that they then took turns assaulting the victim, after bringing her to the building.
The men told the court that they believed the girl was 16 at the time, which is the legal age of consent in Spain, but the judges rejected this argument. The men also denied forcing the girl to have sex.
The court ruled that the girl had found herself in “a situation of helplessness,” and ordered the men to pay the victim 12,000 euros in compensation, about $13,367, for an assault that was described as “extremely intense and especially degrading.”
Women’s associations in Spain have been pushing the judiciary to treat all forms of rape more forcefully. They have also accused Spanish judges of paternalism and bias against women by forcing victims to demonstrate that they had fought back against sex attackers.
After the Pamplona ruling, the Socialist government and other parties promised to renew efforts to fight sexual violence and to help women to bring their complaints to trial. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said at the time that “Spain continues to make progress in protecting the rights and freedoms of women — and will not stop.”
Some analysts said Thursday’s verdict reflected the shortcomings of an outdated criminal code, which defines an attack on an unconscious person as abuse rather than rape.
Lucía Avilés, the founder of an association of female judges, told the national news agency Efe that it was time to change the criminal code so that it was “understood that only a ‘yes’ means ‘yes’ and that consent must be given in a free, conscious and responsible manner.”
Mr. Sánchez’s deputy prime minister, Carmen Calvo, said at a weekly news conference that the government would not comment on the ruling. She hinted that the case could be appealed to the Supreme Court, as had occurred with that of Pamplona.
Source : Nytimes
