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    France, Where Age of Consent Is Up for Debate - The Atlantic
    ▻https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/frances-existential-crisis-over-sexual-harassment-laws/550700

    On April 24, 2017, a 28-year-old-man met an 11-year-old girl in a park in Montmagny, just north of Paris, after which, he took her home where he had oral and vaginal sex with her. When it was over, the girl called her mother and described what had happened, and her mother called the police. “She thought … that she didn’t have the right to protest, that it wouldn’t make any difference,” the mother told Mediapart, a French investigative site which first reported on the allegations of the case. The accusations were of an adult raping a child—a crime that, in France, can lead to a 20-year prison sentence for the perpetrator when the victim is 15 or younger.

    But it initially wasn’t charged that way. When the case first went to court in September, the man faced only charges of “sexual infraction,” a crime punishable with a maximum of five years in jail and a €75,000 fine. Under French law, a charge of rape requires “violence, coercion, threat, or surprise,” even if the victims are as young as the girl in the Montmagny case. When the case, initially postponed, went back to court in February, the man’s attorneys did not deny the sexual encounter but argued that the girl had been capable of consenting. “She was 11 years and 10 months old, so nearly 12 years old,” defense lawyer Marc Goudarzian said. Sandrine Parise-Heideiger, his fellow defense lawyer, added: “We are not dealing with a sexual predator on a poor little faultless goose.”

    Such a defense flies in the face of legal and cultural consensus in most Western nations, and much of the world. “With children there is inevitably coercion,” Ernestine Ronai, co-president of the gender-based violence commission at the government’s High Council for Equality between Women and Men, told me. “It is indefensible that a girl of 11 could be considered consenting with a 28-year-old man. This is shocking,” she added.

    Indeed, the judge did ultimately order that rape charges be filed, in what Carine Durrieu-Diebolt, the attorney for the girl and her family, called a “victory for victims.” The case has been postponed to allow for a more thorough investigation into the allegations. But in the meantime, it has also provoked an unprecedented backlash that has resulted in France considering a change to a longstanding, anomalous feature of its laws: Up to now, there has been no legal age of consent for sex.

    Under French law, “rape” is defined as “any act of sexual penetration, of whatever nature, committed on the person of another by violence, coercion, threat or surprise.” Yet unlike elsewhere, there is no presumption of coercion if a sexual minor is involved. Most other countries in Europe, including Spain, Belgium, Britain, Switzerland, Denmark and Austria, have a legal age of consent. Most of the age minimums range between 14 and 16 years of age. Fixing a specific age of consent means that children and adolescents below that age cannot, regardless of circumstances, be considered consenting to sex; their very age renders them incapable. As a result, an adult in most European nations who has sex with someone under this age would be charged with rape, even if violent force is not used.

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    • @mad_meg
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      Most other countries in Europe, including Spain, Belgium, Britain, Switzerland, Denmark and Austria, have a legal age of consent. Most of the age minimums range between 14 and 16 years of age. Fixing a specific age of consent means that children and adolescents below that age cannot, regardless of circumstances, be considered consenting to sex; their very age renders them incapable. As a result, an adult in most European nations who has sex with someone under this age would be charged with rape, even if violent force is not used.

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      After May 1968, French intellectuals would challenge the state’s authority to protect minors from sexual abuse. In one prominent example, on January 26, 1977, Le Monde, a French newspaper, published a petition signed by the era’s most prominent intellectuals—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, André Glucksmann and Louis Aragon—in defense of three men on trial for engaging in sexual acts with minors. “French law recognizes in 13- and 14-year-olds a capacity for discernment that it can judge and punish,” the petition stated, “But it rejects such a capacity when the child’s emotional and sexual life is concerned.” Furthermore, the signatories argued, children and adolescents have the right to a sexual life: “If a 13-year-old girl has the right to take the pill, what is it for?” It’s unclear what impact, if any, the petition had. The defendants were sentenced to five years in prison, but did not serve their full sentences.

      In 1979, Liberation published another petition, this time in support of Gérard R., a man on trial for having sex with girls between the ages of six and 12. It was signed by 63 people, many of them well-known intellectuals like Christiane Rochefort and Pascal Bruckner. It argued that the girls in question were “happy” with the situation. “The love of children is also the love of their bodies,” they wrote. “Desire and sexual games have their place in the relationship between children and adults. This is what Gérard R. thought and experienced with [the] girls … whose fulfillment proved to everyone, including their parents, the happiness they found with him.”

      What the endorsements from prominent French intellectuals suggested was that young children possessed a right to govern their own sexuality. Under this interpretation of liberté, young children were empowered to find happiness in sexual relationships; their ability to consent was a foregone conclusion. Any effort to suggest otherwise would be a condescension, a disrespect to them as fully realized human beings. In a radio interview in 1978, Michel Foucault said of sex with minors that assuming “that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.”

      “People have a hard time admitting they were colonized by the discourse of pedocriminals,” Salmona told me. France in the 1970s and 1980s, she said, was an “atrocious” era for children, an active time for a very unapologetic “pedocriminal lobby.”

      Yet it’s hard to know exactly how widespread the so-called pedocriminal lobby’s influence reached. On the one hand, as sociologist and criminologist Patrice Corriveau wrote in 2011, the number of sexual abuse cases involving children in France had been on the rise since 1972. By 1982, he found, sexual offenses against minors had increased by nearly 22 percent—meaning, it seemed as though the stigma against child sex abuse was encouraging victims to come forward. At the same time, while the number of reported cases was on the rise, convictions for homosexual acts with minors were decreasing. As Corriveau explained: “In France … sexual behaviors, homoerotic or not, dropped in importance on the level of judicial intervention as the sexual revolution took hold. In fact, morals offense represented only 0.54 percent of overall criminality in France in 1982.”

      #pedocriminalité #pedosexualité #pedophilie #viol #culture_du_viol #enfance #domination_adulte #domination_masculine #deni #cocorico #liberation_sexuelle #mai68

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