A few days ago a sentence was handed down in the case of the multiple sexual assault in Sant Boi de Llobregat, which occurred in 2018. Given this sentence – which recognizes the assault by giving credibility to the victim – it is clear that not only the laws matter but too who applies them and what look does he put on it.
I want to make it clear in advance that I am not interested here in focusing the analysis on the punishment that is applied to the aggressors from the sentence, but how do you decide. That social messages of rejection of sexual violence are mostly focused on what the sentences are or should be and that they are questioning very little what they are social structures that enable these sexual violence to occur only constructs the following narrative: sexual violence is ‘encapsulated’ in certain ‘subjects’ who must be penalized to set an example by setting them apart, because they are an exception. While we only penalize individual culprits We must not ask ourselves anything else. This story makes most of the daily sexual violence invisible. However, it is evident that crimes must be prosecuted and even more so with this level of severity. That is why it is so important to show what role the judicial system plays. Above all, how it applies the laws. Therefore, the message that the judges begin to avoid the logic of blaming the victim for the aggression received and can empathize and correctly read the contexts of the situations of sexual violence that they are judging is infinitely more transformative than the penalty that finally receive the aggressors.
It is at this point that the sentence for the multiple aggression of Sant Boi is relevant; for him different paradigm that has been taken into account for its analysis. It shouldn’t be news, but sadly it is. Without the intention of carrying out a legal analysis, but with a didactic vocation, below are some of the aspects that make it different from other sentences that we have read in recent times.
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To begin with, the sentence -as we said- gives total credibility to the girl’s story. This is not an ideological question; On the one hand, because we know that going through a judicial process where you will be exposed and -too often- questioned is a conscious decision, the result of the need to receive recognition and redress to be able to overcome a painful situation and, on the other hand, because we also know that giving credibility to the person attacked depends on knowing and understanding that the speeches of a person who has experienced a situation like this can often be disjointed, they can present gaps or even contradictions resulting from the traumatic situation, but that does not invalidate them. Another very relevant element in the blamelessness of the victim is that his eventual alcohol or drug use prior to the assault, he did not have a role in the sentence; He has not placed her in a different place due to any of these aspects that often hang in court decisions: consuming does not diminish the credibility of what she has experienced, nor does it tell us about a specific profile of sexual accessibility, it is not even necessary suggest that the consumption was involuntary. That is, women, legitimately, can decide to consume substances or not, but this fact does not change the right to live without being constantly with the alert not to be attacked. When we do not consume substances it must be because we want to; not as a protection strategy. We cannot be responsible for the rights that others violate. Third and last, violence and intimidation are considered proven by two reasons: the numerical difference and for having been transferred by the perpetrators to a field, with the inability to ask for help. Also here the elements of the context are analyzed to understand the multiple ways of intimidating and not strictly the resistance offered by the victim. It seems that it is beginning to be understood: fear in such a context is often death. In the face of the fear of death, resistance is not the natural reaction of the human being. Let’s stop making moral judgments about how much a woman must resist to understand that “she has preserved her sexual honor”. Let’s see if this sentence is finally the beginning of a new humanizing path of justice.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com