In Spain, thousands protest verdict in sex crime case: Men convicted of "Sexual abuse"
MADRID — Thousands of Spaniards, mostly women of all ages, took to the streets Monday to demand changes in the law after a ruling in a sex-crime case involving an unconscious teenager renewed anger over the way victims are treated by the legal system.
The protests come after five men accused of gang-raping an intoxicated 14-year-old girl were sentenced to 10 to 12 years behind bars. The outrage was not so much over the length of the prison terms as over the court’s decision to convict them of the lesser crime of sexual abuse instead of sexual assault or rape.
The Barcelona-based court found last week that because the victim had drunk alcohol and smoked marijuana, she “could not accept or reject the sexual relations.” The men, it said, were therefore able to have sex with her without using violence or intimidation — an element required under Spanish law for a crime to be a sexual assault.
The ruling recalled a similar case, also in 2016, in which an 18-year-old was alleged to have been raped by five men at the start of the Pamplona festival that includes the world-famous Running of the Bulls. The initial verdict found the defendants guilty of sexual abuse because the judges saw no intimidation in the way the men cornered the victim in a lonely hallway.
But that was overruled earlier this year by Spain’s Supreme court following a wave of street protests. The court extended the men’s prison terms from nine years to 15 in a landmark ruling that said that the victim, outnumbered, had been subjected to “surrounding intimidation.”
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-11-04/in-spain-thousands-protest-verdict-in-sex-crime-case
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