She has condemned France for not adequately protecting a woman subject to a sadomasochistic relationship with a professional superior. The man, 16 years older than the victim, was head of a pharmacy of a hospital whom she joined as a training employee. The two renegotiated on several occasions a sexual nature contract between them. The sentence, however, emphasizes that the woman had “begged” repeatedly not to be subject to sexual practices. According to the court, “for current sexual practice” and cannot be based on a commitment signed in the past. The French justice had exculpated the defendant, covering in that agreement between the two, so France now must pay 20,000 euros for moral damages, as well as 1,503.77 euros for procedural costs.
In his sentence, published on Thursday, European judges underline that this contract, which they have called “Master-Perra”, was actually “one of the instruments of coercive control” used by man. In addition, for the Strasbourg Court, “no form of past commitment, even in the form of a written contract, can constitute a current consent to a certain sexual practice, since consent is by nature revocable.”
Nancy’s Court of Appeal had considered that the victim’s signature in that contract (identified by its acronym EA) supposed a form of consent to the sadomasochistic relationship, estimating that the woman had given her approval for “the set of violent sexual practices that had been subsequently inflicted.”
However, for European judges, this document should not even have been taken into account by French justice. On the contrary, they should have examined the allegations of the woman, who said that some of those practices were against her will and continued even when she “had begged” the man – identified as Dr. KB – to interrupt them.
The woman, born in 1983, was declared as a medical leave in 2013, three years after being hired by the hospital in which the two worked. Subsequently, she was hospitalized in a psychiatric service. On July 30 of that same year, the hospital’s deputy director informed the Prosecutor’s Office that the young woman had declared to be a victim of a domain relationship with “forced sexual relations.”
Days later, the aggressor was suspended from his functions and, later, expelled from the body of doctors from the hospital. He became convicted in the first instance, but Nancy’s Court of Appeal ended up acquitting it in 2021.
That decision led the plaintiff to present her case before the European Court, with the support of the European Association against Violence against Women, which argued that the criminal provisions in.
