The Spanish Senate gave the green light on Tuesday to a law against sexual violence that establishes the obligation of explicit consenta measure that the leftist government championed after the gang rape of “La Manada” of a young woman.
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In any case, since the Senate approved an amendment to the regulation known as the “only yes is yes”, the text will have to return to the Congress of Deputies for its final ratification on a date to be defined, before its promulgation.
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The deputies had already approved the project in first reading in May. The text, which implies a reform of the Spanish Penal Code, places “consent” at the center, which will only be understood “when it has been freely expressed through acts that (…) clearly express the will of the person.”
The use of violence or intimidation will therefore no longer be necessary to classify a crime of rape, as was the case until now.
This issue was key in the case of “La Manada”, the gang rape of an 18-year-old girl in 2016 during the San Fermín festivities in Pamplona (north) by five men who recorded the events, boasting of their actions, and who shared the videos on WhatsApp.
His sentence in the first instance, in April 2018, was nine years in prison for the crime of “sexual abuse”. Defined by the absence of violence or intimidation, this crime that carried less stringent penalties will now disappear under the new law.
That first sentence caused massive mobilizations of women in Spain under the slogan “I do believe you”, in addition to numerous requests to toughen the Penal Code. Outside the country, the case generated large feminist mobilizations in Chile.
Finally, in June 2019, the Spanish Supreme Court corrected the sentence and considered that there was rape, for which it increased the sentences for the accused to 15 years in prison. Since he came to power in June 2018, the government of the socialist Pedro Sánchez has promised to adopt a law on explicit consent.
“We don’t want more ‘herds,’ neither for ourselves nor for our daughters,” socialist senator Donelia Roldán Martínez said on Tuesday.
AFP
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