The Barcelona Court has sentenced a man to four years in prison who in March 2020 raped a young woman with whom he had gone to a party in a Barcelona nightclub, after a friend drugged her by introducing an unknown substance into a shot .
Section 21 of the Court of Barcelona imposes on the defendant, D.P.V., the minimum sentence provided for crimes of abuse with penetration before the entry into force of the law of only yes is yes, which toughens sentences in cases of rape by chemical submission and considers them sexual assault.
The reason why the sentence imposes the minimum sentence is that, according to the court, the circumstances in which the rape occurred are unknown since the victim, who woke up the next day with anal fissures and pain in her ovaries, was not conscious.
The rape occurred on March 7, 2020. The young woman went with the defendant and some of his friends to a nightclub in Barcelona, ​​where they both drank from a bottle of rum that she herself had previously bought in a store, according to what the victim told before the court.
The woman, who on other occasions had had consensual sexual relations with the defendant, confessed that she felt somewhat drunk while dancing in the disco, but it was not until she drank a drink given to her by an unidentified friend of the defendant, when she fell unconscious. . She woke up the next day, in the condemned man’s car.
The ruling considers it accredited that D.P.V. he “took advantage” of the fact that the victim had lost consciousness of her to rape her, “without her being able to offer the slightest resistance.”
To convict the defendant, a WhatsApp conversation that he had with the victim the next day was key: “Did you rape me?” the young woman asked him, while expressing her concern about whether it had been an unprotected sexual relationship. The defendant , after admitting that he had not used a condom, replied: “Hahaha, what’s up! Then you liked it.”
The sentence prohibits the defendant from coming within a thousand meters of the victim or communicating with her by any means during the period of one year after his release from prison and also imposes a measure of probation for four years, as well as the payment of compensation of 10,000 euros to the young woman for the moral damages suffered.
The court emphasizes that it has not made reference in its sentence to the existence of “libidinous mood” on the part of the accused when perpetrating the rape, a concept that feminism has always questioned as a basic element of crimes against sexual freedom.
In this sense, the chamber recalls that the Supreme Court resolved this issue in a 2021 ruling that establishes that the only element required by the crime of abuse is the will to threaten the freedom or indemnity of the victim, although “the purpose of the perpetrator is not necessarily to obtain sexual satisfaction”.
