Abstract
AbstractThe controversial trial of five men accused of gang-raping a young woman during the 2016 San Fermín festival and their conviction not for rape, but for a lesser crime of sexual abuse in 2018, known as La Manada (the Wolf-Pack) case, brought the Spanish law under intense public scrutiny. The case led to an outpouring of protests across the country and called for the urgent reform of rape laws, which then led to the drafting of new provisions to address the outcry. To set the analysis in the context of feminist activism, this Article is organized around the hashtags used during the protests. Accordingly, this Article examines three aspects of considerable debate: Namely the distinction between sexual abuse and rape (“it’s not abuse, it’s rape!”), the murky legal understanding of consent (“only yes is yes”), and the introduction of the gender perspective in the legal system (“sister, I believe you”). By addressing these issues, this Article demonstrates the pervasive influence of feminism over recent Spanish law-making, and the continued resistance which such efforts meet. This Article concludes by scrutinizing this effect and examining the conditions under which a civil society network may succeed in challenging socially outdated legal provisions.
Highlights
The controversial trial of five men accused of gang-raping a young woman during the 2016 San Fermín festival and their conviction not for rape, but for a lesser crime of sexual abuse in 2018, known as La Manada case, brought the Spanish law under intense public scrutiny
A minority of feminist lawyers and scholars maintained that the statutes and the criminal justice system continued to reflect a legacy of patriarchy, employing assumptions and standards about consent, force, resistance, and “proper” behavior of victims that were biased against women in cases of sexual violence
It was generally ignored that the standards of rape law and the procedures to enforce those standards failed to account for the perspective and interests of women
Summary
Sex Crimes in the Spanish Penal Code Sex crimes, including rape, are regulated under Article 178, of the Spanish Penal Code.[9]. Some features were modernized in 1989, mainly by describing offenders and victims in a gender-neutral way and including in the legal definition of sexual intercourse penetration with the penis or an object of the vagina, anus, or mouth.[11] These changes were partly promoted by the feminist movement,[12] which had been raising objections and advocating changes in rape law since the late 1970s They were welcomed in literature.[13] In 1995, the new Penal Code changed the definition of sex crimes, introducing the current difference between sexual abuse and sexual aggression based on the presence of violence or intimidation. Concerns regarding the extent to which the notion of false allegations of rape continues to pervade the public and legal imagination, negatively impacting women involved in the criminal justice system and crashing against offenders’ right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence.[21]
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