Two committees of the European Parliament agreed on Monday to defend that the future community legislation on violence against women defines in all the countries of the European Union the crime of rape based on the lack of consent on the part of the victim and not on the use of the strength, as many Member States still require.
In the absence of the final process of its approval in the plenary session of the institution, scheduled for July, this will be the position that the European Parliament will defend in its negotiation with the Council (the countries), which would also criminalize forced sterilization or female genital mutilation but not the refusal of abortion or pimping.
Faced with the list of crimes initially covered by the proposed Brussels directive, the European Parliament is in favor of adding sexual assault, intersex genital mutilation, forced sterilization, forced marriage and workplace sexual harassment.
The classification of sex without consent as rape throughout the European Union has been left out of the negotiating position of the EU countries for this directive, although it was in the first proposal of the Commission.
“No woman in Europe will understand or agree to remove non-consensual sex as a crime in the directive. A rape does not have to be violent: if a woman does not consent, it is rape,” defended one of the main negotiators of the text, the popular Irish MEP Frances Fitzgerald, in a statement.
For the European Parliament, the crime of rape must be punished with a maximum penalty of at least eight years in prison, and at least ten years if there are aggravating circumstances such as the victim being a minor, pregnant, asylum seeker, retired or victim human trafficking, among others.
MEPs also want to criminalize forms of violence and harassment against women online, including the posting of intimate images without the consent of the victim; Faced with the initial proposal, the Parliament will defend that the concept of “intimate material” can also include images of a non-sexual nature.
The plenary session of the European Parliament will validate this negotiating proposal in its next plenary session and the talks with the Council will take place in the next semester, coinciding with the Spanish presidency.
