This Thursday, Podemos’ only yes is yes law has been rectified in Congress with the sum of votes of the two major parties, PP and PSOE, together with Ciudadanos and PNV. A rectification that comes after six months of controversy over the reduction of sentences for sexual offenders.
Thus, the reform of the ‘yes is yes’ law toughens the sentences for sexual assault in those cases in which physical violence or intimidation occurs.
However, the proposed changes do not touch some cases of sexual assault that were lowered with the law promoted by the Ministry of Equality that led to numerous reductions in sentences for sexual assault or abuse. In these cases, they would continue to be penalized in a milder way than before the reform.
Regardless of how they affect consent, the consequences for the basic crime of rape -sexual assault with violence and penetration- returns to the fork of six to 12 years of punishment. An important correction since the law of ‘yes is yes’ had placed the margin from four to twelve years.
While sexual assaults with violence and without penetration: before yes is yes, it entailed a fork of one to five years in prison, which Equality left at one to four and now returns to the above.
In cases of aggravating circumstances, the reform of the ‘yes is yes’ law also returns to the previous Penal Code, although it includes the distinction between sexual assaults with violence and without it. In this way, it maintains the aggravating range of 2 to 8 years and 7 to 15 years in cases of sexual assault with or without penetration. Whereas, if there is violence or intimidation, it recovers the forks from 5 to 10 years and from 12 to 15 years respectively.
In the case of sexual assaults with penetration and without violence -previously called abuse- to minors under 16 years of age. The minimum of eight years was lowered to six with the yes is yes, which led to numerous reductions in firm sentences. That minimum of six years does not rise in the new Equality proposal, so it would continue to be the penalty from which the new sentences would start.
In the field of minors under 16 -the age at which sexual consent is established-, legal sources critical of the Podemos proposal maintain that a deficient wording would prevent the aggravating factor of violence from being applied to sexual assaults. Doing so would mean double-valuing that detrimental circumstance for the defendant, something that is not allowed.
With the reform, the wording of the first two points drawn up by Equality is maintained, which state that: “it will only be understood that there is consent when it has been freely expressed through acts that, in view of the circumstances of the case, clearly express the will of the person” and that “in all cases sexual assault is considered to be acts of sexual content that are carried out using violence, intimidation or abuse of a situation of superiority or vulnerability of the victim, as well as those that are carried out on people who are deprived of meaning or whose mental situation is being abused and those carried out when the victim has been canceled for any reason”.
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