A Barcelona court on Thursday acquitted five men accused of raping a 14-year-old girl of the most serious charges of sexual aggression and convicted them instead of sexual abuse on the grounds that the victim was under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
The five men were jailed for between 10 and 12 years on charges of continuous sexual abuse. A sixth man was acquitted on the grounds that he had not actively participated in the incident, in the northeast town of Manresa.
The prosecution had asked for the men to be convicted of sexual aggression, which carries a 15-to-20-year sentence, saying that the victim had been unable to defend herself.
However, the court ruled the men “were able to carry out these sexual acts without resorting to violence or intimidation” because the victim was “in an unconscious state” from drugs and alcohol “and didn’t know what she was or wasn’t doing.”
The victim was awarded £12,000 (US$15,549) in compensation for an attack the court described as “extremely intense and particularly degrading.”
The judges rejected a claim by the accused that they were unaware the girl was under 16 and so below the age of consent.
Altamira Gonzalo, of the female jurists’ group Themis, condemned Thursday’s verdict.
“The Barcelona court continues to believe that women must put up a heroic resistance,” Gonzalo said. “They have taken a benevolent view of men who, with their trousers round their ankles, took turns at raping a 14-year-old girl who, as well as being under the effects of alcohol, was in a situation where she couldn’t defend herself.”
“The judges have had no difficulty seeing this from the point of view of the aggressors, but that not of the victim,” she added.
The attack took place at a party in an abandoned factory in October 2016. The case has been dubbed the “Manresa manada,” after the notorious case of the five men calling themselves La Manada, or the “wolf pack,” who were jailed for 15 years earlier this year for the rape of an 18-year-old woman during the running of the bulls in Pamplona in 2016.
The Pamplona case led to an outcry and public protests after the judges initially ruled that the victim, who had only met the accused 20 minutes before the attack took place, consented to oral, vaginal and anal sex with all five of them.
Giving evidence in July, the Manresa victim said that one of the accused was a friend with whom she had sexual relations a week earlier and whom she trusted.
She said that he was the one who led her to the shack where he raped her and then invited his friends to do likewise, telling them they each had 15 minutes.
A lawyer at the Madrid branch of Women’s Link, an international group dedicated to advancing women’s rights, said that in Spain, whether an act constitutes as statutory rape hinges depends on if violence and intimidation were used, with the criteria the same for minors and adults.
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