Madrid: Spain’s feminist movement is pushing for changes to the law after a court acquitted five men of gang raping an 18-year-old woman at Pamplona’s bull-running festival.
Protesters have filled streets across the country in response to appeals from women’s groups, leading Spain’s conservative government to announce it will consider changing rape laws.
The current law is founded “on a concept of violence based on a male experience”, said Mariam Martinez Bascunan, a political science professor at Madrid’s Autonomous University.
Under Spain’s criminal code, evidence of violence or intimidation must exist for the offence of rape to be proved.’ “This legal nuance, which is not always easy to establish, leads to the painful question of just how much a person needs to fight to avoid being raped without risking getting killed, and still get recognised as a victim of a serious attack against sexual freedom while ensuring that the perpetrators do not enjoy impunity,” top-selling daily El Pais wrote in an editorial.
Spain’s rape laws were thrust into the spotlight after a Pamplona court on Thursday acquitted the five men of sexual assault, which includes rape, but found them guilty of the lesser offence of “sexual abuse”. They were jailed for nine years.
The men, aged 27 to 29, were accused of raping the woman at the entrance to an apartment building in Pamplona on July 7, 2016, at the start of the week-long San Fermin festival.
The five, all from the southern city of Seville, filmed the incident with their smartphones and then bragged about it on a WhatsApp messaging group where they referred to themselves as “La Manada”, or “The Pack” in English.
