OSLO, June 6 (Reuters) - Norway strengthened its rape laws on Friday by criminalising sex without explicit consent, joining a growing list of countries to widen the definition of sexual attacks. Up to now, prosecutors have had to show that an attacker used violence or threatening behaviour, or had sexual intercourse with someone who was unable to resist, to secure a conviction for rape.
Under the new law passed by parliament, anyone who has sex with someone who has not consented to it by word or deed could be convicted of rape, even without violence. Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland have all introduced consent-based rape laws in recent years. Sweden changed the legal definition of rape in 2018 to sex without consent - a change that officials said resulted in a 75% rise in rape convictions. Denmark followed in 2020 by passing a law that widened the circumstances that could constitute rape.
Seriously, I adore Nordic countries for just grinding details in such important aspects of life. Almost, it seems, without prejudice.
There’s that bitch eurocommissioner from Sweden, though, who doesn’t want the same approach to E2EE and censorship, for which she presses.
Consenting by deed should be kinda more specific, though. Or a girl making a “provocative move with her hip” or whatever will become consent.
At the same time consenting only by word would be problematic, some people are non-verbal generally, some in specific situations, and, eh, those involving sexual consent are often among such. Yep, selective mutism is a symptom of a disability. We are all nice and inclusive, right?
Common sense. Don’t know why that’s not the law already everywhere but better late than never.
Because enough ruling dudes literally, publicly said it was going too far because now a drunk girl could claim she didn’t remember most of the previous night and was raped.
And a bunch of other dudes said they had sex with a drunk girl who later said she never wanted it. All these dudes knew they wouldn’t be having sex if the girls had to be conscious and aware.
And so now a bunch of dudes were afraid their continued sex with a drunk girl was going to get them arrested. So they stopped the harder rape laws.
True story.
I’m just going off (English language) reporting, not the text itself. But I don’t see anything about the new law invalidating drunken consent.
Hmm. Consent during an altered mind state can definitely be a form of coercion. It is very tricky.
This will have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. They will see if it does what it is supposed to do or not. If it doesn’t work the law will probably change.
In this context I can fully recommend this article by the wonderful Aella. Rape - as with many other things - being a spectrum is something that seems so obvious in retrospect but so outlandish as an initial thought because it’s hard to conceptualize when legislation usually calls for or assumes just some kind of boolean “consent yes/no” state.
I wish the world wasn’t so complicated.Didn’t Aella go off the right-wing deep end or am I thinking of the wrong person?
Didn’t Aella go off the right-wing deep end or am I thinking of the wrong person?
Haven’t seen any indicators in the stuff I’ve read, but these days that’s not enough for me to give a confident “no”.
After a short search, it might have been Shoe0nHead that I was thinking of, but the info I saw on her didn’t even seem consistent about her beliefs, ranging from raging alt-right figurehead to libertarian Trump disliker.
Who the fuck knows anymore? I’m not gonna risk getting served alt-right nonsense to find out more.
Shoe’s a populist socdem, which isn’t the majority of her content that’d be her having no respect for identity politics.
I feel “word or deed” isn’t the entire story, right? Once the burden of proof is this way around, and it’s a he-said-she-said case like with spoken word, you’ll kind of want to fill out a form and have it in writing.
But word or deed is the right thing to do, you shouldn’t have sex unless it is clear the other person is on the same page, and they show it in some way.Edit: I think my previous take here wasn’t super clever. Seems the main achievement of this bill is rewriting law so sex is about consent. Directly. And not defining rape via some other things like coercion or violence (which might have loopholes or other issues). And now consent (or the lack thereof) is the deciding factor.
It is still criminal law so “innocent until proven guilty”.
The issue was that before “didnt resist, but wasnt physically incapable” was enough to not make it rape, even if there is other reasons why the victim might not resist, being too scared to resist being the obvious one.
It is still criminal law so “innocent until proven guilty”.
You have to think about situations where one did consent at first, but later, afterwards, changes their mind.
There will be no real evidence, but then the accuser will (must) be regarded a witness.
1:0
The accused has no way of getting out.
How is that different from now?
In most cases there is only the accuser and accused that are witnesses.
The court will still have to evaluate if the statements made are believable and evidence is consistent with it or not.
Sweden has these laws since quite a while. Contrary to the outrage back then, it seems there has been no relevant increase in false allegations being prosecuted.
Luckily the courts are smarter than that.
/Swede, where we had the same change to our laws a few years back
So, how do they solve it?
(As far as I remember, they didn’t when it went against Julian Assange)
That law wasn’t in effect and wouldn’t have applied to Assange. However, the facts that he admitted to would constitute rape even under the previous law. (He penetrated her without condom when she had previously consented to sex based on the premise that a condom was used).
Courts together with the police are quite good at figuring out when a story doesn’t hold. We actually had such a case just these last few days where the woman got sentenced instead for having lied about being raped.
So, how do they solve it?
I understand that now a determined lack of consent can get you sent to jail, but I don’t understand how are they going to prove lack of consent. And changed consent (strong yes then no) is also going to be difficult to prove.
How does this law change the burden of proof?
Good question. I was under the assumption lawmakers don’t mandate something to exist (consent), unless it’s also someone’s obligation to take care of it. And it obviously can’t be the injured party… But you might be right, there is more to it. Unfortunately it’s kind of hard to get the exact wording of the bill. The journalists don’t seem to provide any links for me to look it up. But yeah, I’ll edit my post, that was mostly my speculation.
I think some people are getting confused and are thinking it’s about signing a consent form (if I understand correctly from the comments), but actually prosecutors would still have to prove that consent did not happen. Sex without consent was already sexual assault under the previous law so what will change is the crime one can be charged with for a certain act and (presumably) the maximum sentence.
I’m not sure about that either. From what I read sex without consent was not necessarily a crime under the previous law, and that’s what they fixed?! I finally have to find some source and read what actually happened and what’s in the bill and not just some summary…
Edit: From reading a few news articles, I’d say consent wasn’t the deciding factor under previous law. So technically having sex without consent was fine. Unless there was something like coercion or violence involved. And likely there are quite some loopholes with that.
Oof. Then the old law was insane and this is a much greater correction than I thought.
That does nothing for withdrawn consent or limited consent. This means once you sign, anything goes, and your ability to claim otherwise it’s likely zero.
This is good for the law, but likely enhances retaliatory claims and quells legit claims of withdrawn consent. On the other side it makes positive kit tests with no consent document a slam dunk.
You’re right. You can’t issue a blank check. Or you can’t ever change your mind later on. So having consent in writing is certainly not a good idea.
We really need to do something about it though. Several women have been raped, but their rapists got cleared of it. It’s clearly a situation where the women are being raped, but they didn’t fight hard enough to not be raped. That’s seriously the reasoning in court.
One fought hard, but he strangled her enough for her to be afraid for her life. So she stopped fighting, and he raped her. The fact she didn’t fight MORE was the reason it wasn’t rape.
Another was bound and gagged, and couldn’t fight back, so it wasn’t rape. This case made a giant splash. The guys got doxxed but they also doxxed themselves by bragging on TikTok, turns out they had raped several other women, and girls under 16.
Wait, what happened before when you had sex with someone without their consent?
Was there an intermediate thing, or… how did that work?
Also a very serious offence with a prison sentence, but with a different legal definition than “rape”. Something like sexual assault / coercion.
Right. Seems like… you know, less of a big deal than both supporters and detractors further down this thread are making it out to be, then.
Brock Turner knows
I am unpleasantly surprised to find no sexual consent apps. They exist for photography and video, but not for sexual intimacy. It seems like a useful app and something relatively easy to create by modifying existing “modeling” consent apps.
EDIT: A neat example could be an app with a simple screen that says “I consent to have sexual relations with Jomiran” and when you press the icon it takes a selfie of the person and watermarks the consent on it. Probably a good idea to add automatic face detect so it can blur the rest, just in case they are already naked.
The issue with this is that consent can be withdrawn at any point. You don’t just agree to have sex and you’re good for the night. Consent is a constant thing.
Yeah what if the person starts some freakiness you didn’t consent to?
Of course, you are 100% correct, but there isn’t even a way to prove initial consent. There is also no way to prove that you have shared what you are and are not OK with. There’s nothing of any sort that I can see.
I can totally see the value in that, but I also worry it might result in a “blank cheque” situation where rape allegations are dismissed because one party consented on an app and the other took that as free rein to do whatever.
But you’re right. The other side is potentially protecting people from false allegations.
I doubt that’s worth anything – how do you prove the consenting via app was not coerced?
This could be cool in several situations too, like for boundaries for anonymous hookups or for certain kinks that make communication difficult
This is going to be tricky to implement.
It’s easy to prove rape, or any other sexual violence, as there would be wounds associated with it.
But what about coercion? Clearly if one can coerce a person to have sex, that person could also be made to lie or at least stay quiet.
Rape is generally hard to prove as there are generally two witnesses and one is lieing. we have sometimes discoverd evidente that the ‘victum’ did give concent and later regrets it but most of the time there is only evidence of sex and the two parties have a different story about what happened.
i have no answer to the problem. Rape is far too common but punishing an innocent isn’t the answer.
generally two witnesses and one is lieing.
The defendant’s word has not the same “quality” as the witnesses word.
That’s an insane statement. Think about this in a legal context, wtf?
No, it is quite normal, legally.
I don’t know where you live, though.
While you are correct, in a rape case, there are no traditional witnesses. (Unless there are). There are perpetrators and victims, and defendants and plaintiffs. And a plaintiff’s word has not the same quality as a real witness’s word, either.
Why didn’t they just go ahead and require government approved forms signed in triplicate and notarized? Schedule romantic encounters well in advance to avoid a rape conviction.
Rape is one of the worst crimes. I don’t know what the answer is, but this doesn’t seem to be it.
require government approved forms signed in triplicate and notarized?
Completely with fingerprints, ass-prints etc…
I have taken the liberty of making a form for Germany at least.
From what I understand about Germans, this form could be legitimately useful for the weird kinds of sex
Wait, it was LEGAL before?
No, just defined differently de jure. Before, you had to explicitly disagree for it to be nonconsensual, now you have to explicitly agree for it to be consensual. It went from opt-out to opt-in practice, if you will. Consent was regarded to be implicit, if you did not make it clear you didn’t consent.
So, terrible law got corrected.
A legal definition has changed (improved and corrected, you could say).
Couldn’t even get through the summary, eh?
Consented by word or deed? I’ve always assumed that was the standard, period.
Again I say, IT WAS LEGAL BEFORE TO HAVE SEX WITH SOMEONE WHO HASN’T CONSENTED?
No. Don’t try to twist this into something that it’s not.
“Up to now, prosecutors have had to show that an attacker used violence or threatening behaviour, or had sexual intercourse with someone who was unable to resist, to secure a conviction for rape.”
“Under the new law passed by parliament, anyone who has sex with someone who has not consented to it by word or deed could be convicted of rape, even without violence.”
Why am I the only one who’s shocked that this wasn’t already the law?
Why am I the only one who’s shocked
Because of https://feddit.uk/comment/17905892
No it was not legal, it was a very serious offence carrying a prison sentence. The law just didn’t call that situation “rape” before.
Thank you for answering my question.
What was it called, if you don’t mind me asking?
Translating legal terms is hard, but it is something like “grave sexual coercion/assault”
That’s how the state of Texas in the US ended all rape. The governor declared rape was illegal, even though it already was, and suddenly there is no more rape.
And that’s why Texas abortion prohibition doesn’t need an exclusion for rape, because the governor declared rape was illegal and now there is no more rape.
Texas Republicans are pretty magical like that.
