The progressive government of Spain announced this Monday that it intends to modify its law approved last year on sexual violence against women, to close legal loopholes that have allowed sentence reductions or release of some aggressors.
“In the next few days we will present this bill (…), which of course is going to be a serious text, a rigorous text that provides an answer and a solution to those undesired effects that have occurred, and that obviously we do not want repeat themselves,” said the Minister of Education, Pilar Alegría, who is also the spokesperson for the Socialist Party (POSE).
“Logically, (…) The formula to punctually retouch those unwanted effects that have occurred will be substantiated in an increase in the penalties of sexual offenders”he added before journalists, reported the AFP news agency.
The controversy broke out in November, six weeks after it came into force the so-called “only yes is yes” law, to consider all sexual activity without explicit consent as an assaultin response to the case of the group rape of La Manada to a young woman that occurred in Madrid, in 2016.
The new text toughened the legal arsenal against rape by eliminating the “abuses”, more minor, and integrating all sexual crimes in the category of “aggressions”.
But the regulations reduced the minimum and maximum penalties for some caseswhich led to many sentenced to request a review of the sentencebecause in Spain the new laws can be applied retroactively if they benefit the prisoner.
In recent days, rumors about the government’s desire to make the changes triggered tension with Sánchez’s minority partner of the social democrat PSOE in the ruling coalition, the left-wing party Podemos, which championed the law.
At the same time, the main opposition formation, The right-wing Popular Party (PP) inflamed the controversy by offering the Socialists parliamentary support to modify the law without having to count on their partners.
But Irene Montero, Minister of Equality and a member of Podemos, rejected any possibility of going back and promised to do “everything necessary”. to ensure that consent remains at the core of the law.
The leader of her party, Ione Belarra, expressed the same line.
“The consent has to continue in the center of the penal code. We cannot return to the ordeal of proving that we resisted enough or that we had not drunk,” Belarra wrote on Twitter.who is Minister of Social Rights.
The socialist ministers insisted, however, that the changes will try to correct the undesired effects, but that they will not affect the question of consent.
“The correction and modification of the ‘only yes is yes’ law is to prevent unwanted effects from occurring in the future,” the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, told reporters.
Bolaños guaranteed that the text will continue “maintaining consent at the center of the penal regime of sexual assaults to prevent women from having an evidentiary ordeal in trials.”
Until the entry into force of the law, rape victims had to prove that they had been subjected to violence or intimidation, since without these conditions the crime was considered abuse and not sexual assault, with lighter penalties.