The Supreme Court warns in a new sentence that consent has always been at the center of crimes against sexual freedom

Protesters in front of the headquarters of the Supreme Court in June 2019 when the review of the sentence of La Manada was made public.Andrea Comas

The main reason that Podemos alleges to reject the socialist proposal to reform the

is that this text, by aggravating the penalties for sexual assaults committed with violence or intimidation, would damage "the heart" of the norm, which, according to those responsible for the Ministry of Equality, is to punish any sexual act committed without the consent of one of the parties.

Lawyers have debated in recent weeks whether the importance of consent is really at the heart of the sexual freedom law and most agree that although the new rule introduces a legal definition of consent for the first time, this was already the element determinant to establish whether or not there was a crime before the law of

This is also believed by the Supreme Court, which in a sentence notified yesterday consolidates this interpretation.

"It is difficult to question, in the regulation prior to the reform operated by LO 10/2022, any inconsensual sexual contact deserved the corresponding punishment," says a sentence, for which magistrate Javier Hernández has been a rapporteur, and in which the Criminal Chamber sentenced a man to eight years and four months in prison for sexually abusing a daughter and a son, the latter under 16 years of age.

The rapporteur cites in his writing another ruling, from January 20, in which the Supreme Court already ruled in the same direction.

"The concurrence of that absence of consent that permeates the title that embraces these crimes was always necessary, since they are crimes against sexual freedom, which are naturally based on the absence of consent in the provision of the same to carry out actions with sexual content" ,

In that sentence, the magistrates reviewed the changes introduced in the

Regarding the figure of consent, and after recalling that it is the first time that a definition of this concept has been introduced into the law, they point out that the formula used now is "an open formula, and that it was already taken into consideration, in similar terms , jurisprudentially, to understand concurrent consent.

“Historically, our criminal legislation did not have a legal definition of consent that was coined together with the description of the criminal types, which does not mean that jurisprudence has always not understood that it was substantial, as an element, in this negative case. of the type, that the agent acted without the consent of the person sexually assaulted, or under a consent flawed by the circumstances, explains the court.

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