“Historic development” to create a “culture of consent”: the French parliament is set to ratify today a major amendment to the criminal code incorporating the concept of consent into its definition, a few months after the trial of Mazan.
In this trial that turned Giselle Peliko, the victim of a decade of repeated, organized and systematic rape by her husband and fifty other men, into a symbol of the fight against violence, consent/consent took center stage.
With this vote, it joins the group of countries that have amended their legislation in this direction. Among them Sweden, Spain or Norway.
French criminal law will be clarified by explicitly including this concept which is, moreover, omnipresent in jurisprudence.
“Sexual assault is any non-consensual sexual act.” This will be the wording of the relevant French law, when the Senate will vote on the text of two French MPs, Marie-Charlotte Garin and Véronique Riotton.
The positive vote of the Senate, like the one in the National Assembly last week, is undoubted: the vast majority of deputies and senators agree with this amendment of the criminal code.
“It is the completion of a long law-making project with the cooperation between the National Assembly and the Senate. In the end, we have a clear and easy-to-read text on the concept of consent,” says Senator Elsa Salk, rapporteur of the text in the Senate.
“When it’s not no, it doesn’t mean it’s yes”
This legislative text “sends a message to our society. We are collectively moving from a culture of rape to a culture of consent,” says Véronique Riotton.
“When it’s not no, it doesn’t mean it’s yes” and “when it’s yes, it should be a real yes”, Marie-Charlotte Garin summarized for her part during the last debates in the National Assembly.
The two French lawmakers have been supporting the amendment of the penal code for a year, after a long information campaign on the issue which until recently met with serious resistance even from some feminist organizations.
The main fears related to the risk of a reversal of the burden of proof which would oblige plaintiffs to prove that they had not consented or also the possible “contractualization” of sexual relations through the legislative text.
Consent/consent will now be clearly defined in the criminal code: “free and clear, qualified, prerequisite and revocable”. “It is evaluated based on the conditions. It is not inferred from silence alone or from the victim’s lack of reaction,” the text states.
“There is no consent if the act of a sexual nature was committed by violence, coercion, threat or surprise, whatever their nature,” explains the text, which here repeats pre-existing criteria in the law.
The bill is also supported by the French government.
Only the French far-right opposes the bill in the French parliament: the National Alarm denounced “unprecedented moral and legal overreach”.
“Lawyers should henceforth dissect not the violence of the perpetrator, but the movements, the words, the silence of the person who declares himself a victim,” according to National Alert MP Sophie Blanc.
For its part, the National Federation of Women’s and Family Rights Information Centers points to the need for this historic development to be accompanied by “real training in emotional, interpersonal and sexual life” and the training of judges, police and gendarmes.
