Esquerra and Bildu have already put a price on their support for the reform of the Sexual Freedom Law (baptized as “yes is yes”) proposed by the PSOE. And it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be cheap because they have submitted 23 joint amendments and some of them are quite sensitive: there are two amendments, for example, that are aimed at suppressing the core of the socialist proposal, which is tougher penalties. to sexual offenders in articles 178 and 179 of the Penal Code. The Socialists propose raising the punishment if there is “violence or intimidation or when the victim has her will annulled for any reason.”
On the other hand, the republicans and the abertzales raise that the violence is aggravating (article 180) and, in addition, they try to shield with another amendment the “consent”, according to what “20 Minutes” has advanced. Specifically, the PSOE proposes in its legislative reform to add a point 3 to article 178 (sexual assault without penetration) that reads as follows: “If the assault had been committed using violence or intimidation or on a victim who has had his license annulled for any reason, will, the person responsible will be punished with one to five years in prison”. For article 179 (sexual assault with penetration), it also proposes another similar wording, although with penalties of six to twelve years in prison for the aggressor.
ERC and Bildu propose deleting these two points and introducing violence only as an aggravating circumstance, in article 180, so that it reads as follows: “When violence or intimidation had been used for the commission of sexual assault, or the same goes accompanied by acts of a particularly degrading or vexatious nature, without prejudice to the provisions of article 194 bis”. The Socialists have opposed this because they consider that there must be proportionality and, in this sense, “extreme violence” would not be punished, which is what should act as an aggravating factor, from the point of view of Pedro Sánchez’s party.
In addition, in article 178 of the Penal Code, they propose further specifying the definition of consent, which is the axis of the Law on Sexual Freedom. Currently, the wording of the Criminal Code is as follows: “Anyone who performs any act that violates the sexual freedom of another person without their consent will be punished with a prison sentence of one to four years, as responsible for sexual assault. Only It will be understood that there is consent when it has been freely expressed through acts that, in attention to the circumstances of the case, clearly express the will of the person. To this fragment, ERC and Bildu intend to add: “It will not be deduced that there is consent due to the absence of physical resistance or the silence of the victim, nor due to her previous sexual conduct.”