On 6 February 2024, the European Union’s Parliament and Council reached an settlement on the Directive on violence towards girls which had been tabled in March 2022. This article will harmonise nationwide laws on sexual harassment, feminine genital mutilation, sterilisation, compelled marriage and “revenge porn” (the leaking of sexual photographs with the intention of harming somebody).
Article 5, which proposed a Europe-wide definition of rape primarily based on the absence of consent, was dropped within the closing draft attributable to a scarcity of settlement. This episode has nonetheless succeeded in opening up and broadening the controversy on rape laws and the notion of sexual consent in Europe.
Because the #MeToo motion in 2018, which noticed a wave of denunciations of aggressors through social networks, the time period “consent” has been on everybody’s lips. Originating within the authorized sphere, its exact which means in sexual and emotional phrases is the topic of a lot debate.
The Article 5 debate
Voting for Article 5 would have meant altering the legislation in all EU nations that shouldn’t have a authorized definition of rape primarily based on consent. These embody France, Portugal, Italy and Poland. Others, together with Spain, Sweden, Finland, Slovenia, Denmark and the Netherlands, have already moved in direction of laws enshrining the rule of “solely sure means sure”.
The choice to not embody Article 5 got here all the way down to little or no. A change of place by France or Germany would have been sufficient to get it adopted. The justification used for the omission? Rape just isn’t a “Eurocrime” as outlined in Article 83 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU.
The European Union has ratified the Istanbul Conference, which establishes a consent-based definition of rape alongside the strains of Article 5. France and Germany are each signatories to that textual content in their very own proper, however Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Czechia usually are not.
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In response to the EU’s Elementary Rights Company, greater than half (55%) of girls within the European Union have been sexually harassed since they had been 15, and one in three (33%) have endured bodily and/or sexual violence.
Between 2021 and 2023, greater than 68,000 studies of rape had been recorded in Europe, in line with information gathered by the Mediterranean Institute for Investigative Reporting (MIIR), as a part of a survey by the European Information Journalism Community (by which Voxeurop participates). Rape and sexual assault are nonetheless the offences least typically reported to the authorities. Eire is a very notable case in that solely 5% of sexual assaults there are reported, in line with the nation’s Central Statistics Workplace.
Victims are actually talking out extra. However for a lot of, our techniques nonetheless fail at supporting and taking care of them, notably on the degree of the courts.
Why ought to the notion of “consent” be enshrined in legislation?
Frédérique Pollet-Rouye, a lawyer and campaigner specialising in sexist and sexual violence, co-authored a December 2023 article revealed in Le Monde and signed by a gaggle of feminine attorneys, authors and judges. Its notably specific title: “Sexual violence: ‘There may be an pressing must redefine rape in prison legislation, for the reason that definition of rape in France presupposes implicit consent'”. She explains: “Underneath present legislation, a sexual act the place it’s established that there was no consent just isn’t thought of to be rape until it may be proven that the accused used bodily violence towards the sufferer, or stunned, threatened or coerced her”.
A change within the legislation ought to make it doable for the courts to take care of rapes that aren’t at the moment handled as such. One other intention is to make it harder for convicted rapists to slide by the web.
The notion of consent due to this fact stays on the coronary heart of the controversy, even in courtrooms the place the legislation focuses on duress. The problem lies in decoding the time period “consent”, and shaping it in such a means that it does no hurt to the victims. Therein lies widespread floor.
A debate amongst feminists too
On 29 January 2024 in Germany, an open letter signed by over 100 girls from the worlds of tradition, enterprise and politics, was despatched to the German federal justice minister Marco Buschmann. In it, the signatories pleaded for the EU directive to be adopted in its authentic type.
Nevertheless, in an article revealed in Le Monde in December 2023, feminist thinker and essayist Manon Garcia disagreed, warning towards a shift in French rape legislation in direction of a model primarily based on non-consent: “It’s a mistake – and a sexist one at that! – to outline rape when it comes to non-consent”, she wrote.
In Spain, a rustic that has already handed an “solely sure means sure” legislation, it was feminist thinker Clara Serra who, within the pages of El Diario, challenged the deserves of such an implicit definition of rape. In her view, if we take into account {that a} girl can not specific her disagreement due to the dynamics of domination, then we should always apply the identical reasoning to a girl who explicitly says “sure”. In any case, this consent may simply as effectively be the product of those similar energy dynamics.
Jana Kujundžić, a researcher specialising in gender-based violence, assesses the state of affairs succinctly: “I imagine {that a} optimistic change within the legislation on rape should spotlight a up to date and evidence-based understanding of rape and sexual violence as a social drawback.”
The MEP and rapporteur of the textual content Ervin Incir (of the Socialists and Democrats, and re-elected on the final EU Parliament election) is optimistic, saying that the directive “may generate the mandatory stress for nationwide governments to replace their authorized definitions to convey them consistent with worldwide human rights requirements, equivalent to these set out within the Istanbul Conference. Sooner or later, we anticipate the European Fee to suggest new laws particularly on rape, constructing on this progress.”
The second rapporteur, the Irish MEP Frances Fitzgerald (European Folks’s Social gathering, not re-elected), is equally hopeful: “On the subject of sexual relations, consent have to be on the coronary heart of the dialog. […] I imagine that this directive can convey a couple of basic change in the way in which we take into consideration society – creating an impression past prison legislation alone”.
🤝 This text is revealed inside the Come Collectively collaborative challenge.
