{"id":343250,"date":"2022-05-27T17:47:32","date_gmt":"2022-05-27T12:17:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.www.bullfrag.com\/what-is-the-governments-new-sexual-freedom-law\/"},"modified":"2022-05-27T17:47:32","modified_gmt":"2022-05-27T12:17:32","slug":"what-is-the-governments-new-sexual-freedom-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bullfrag.com\/what-is-the-governments-new-sexual-freedom-law\/","title":{"rendered":"What is the Government’s new sexual freedom law?"},"content":{"rendered":"
“He didn’t say no”, “he was asking for it”, “you could tell he wanted to”, “we had been drinking” or “it wasn’t entirely clear”: these are common phrases in court in cases of sexual violence. Mechanisms to make the limits of consent more complicated than they already are. The new law promoted by the Ministry of Equality and approved by Congress wants to solve it. What used to be “no means no” has become “only yes means yes” in the sexual freedom law, where consent is everything.<\/p>\n
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Precisely sexual consent has been the protagonist in the debate on sexual crimes in recent years. Media cases such as La Manada or Burjassot and the determination of a part of the political left to take this to the legislative area is settled today with the new law.<\/p>\n
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The new law<\/strong>. More than two years have been necessary for what began as a project promoted by the Ministry of Equality of Irene Montero, and which came to light in 2020, to become law. The Congress of Deputies has given its approval this Thursday (only PP and Vox have opposed). The already publicly named “law of the only yes is yes”, is inspired by the claims in the feminist demonstrations that took to the streets after the sentence of La Manada. And it places sexual consent at the center of it all. It also makes a distinction between sexual abuse and assault, one of the historical demands of feminism.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n Where does consent lie?<\/strong> Under the law, it becomes the most important thing to determine whether or not there is a sexual assault. In other words, we went from a norm that required proving that the victim refused and resisted to another that would require affirmative consent, as required by the Istanbul Convention. And when is there consent? Only “when it has been freely manifested through acts that, given the circumstances, clearly express the will of the person.” That is, “Yes” is green light. Not saying or doing anything is a red light.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Currently, in our Penal Code, the concept of “consent” is still tied to very physical issues, such as the absence or presence of resistance or the lack or existence of pain in the sexual act. In the case of La Manada, the magistrates did not give sufficient weight to the violent coercion, which prevented them from being convicted of rape.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Physical violence, not so necessary. <\/strong>Physical aggression is also of vital importance in the previous legislation. To verify the existence of violence, a “physical means” must be used to bend the will of the victim. For example, tears, hits or shoves. On many occasions, as we saw in the case of La Manada, the victims choose not to resist. And what was concluded then was this: “The absence of injuries does not reveal the existence of violence, which meets the requirements of this element that qualifies the type of sexual assault.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n Distinction between assault and sexual abuse. <\/strong>In addition, the law reforms the classification of sexual crimes in the Penal Code and ends the distinction between sexual assault and abuse, a widely discussed debate since the La Manada trial that had been causing headaches in the feminist sector of politics since time immemorial. More specifically since 1995, when the left precisely demanded the introduction of that distinction. Now, with the new law, all those behaviors that violate sexual freedom without the consent of the other person will be considered sexual assault and there will be different ranges of penalties depending on the severity and the concurrence of aggravating circumstances.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We return to a debate from almost 30 years ago: the distinction between abuse and assault was introduced precisely to grade crimes and prevent “minor assaults” where guilt was not clear or the use of violence was more diffuse from going unconvicted.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n