The European Court of Human Right’s decision comes after France has been rocked by a series of high-profile rape cases and as its parliament considers a bill to include lack of consent in the definition of rape.
French courts had also not “taken sufficient account, in evaluating whether the applicants had been capable of understanding and of giving consent, of the particularly vulnerable situations in which they had found themselves”, the ECHR added.
She was under heavy medication as she suffered from anxiety attacks, and between 2008 and 2010 firefighters on 130 occasions intervened at her home outside Paris after they were called in to help.
She accused 14 firefighters in total of rape, but almost all of them claimed she had consented to sexual relations.
’Wake-up call’
French law changed in 2021 so that a child younger than 15 cannot legally give their consent to an adult.
The victim is now largely disabled after several suicide attempts.
It reported that at least twice French authorities had failed in their duty to protect her dignity, “by permitting the use of moralising and guilt-inducing statements, which propagated gender stereotypes”.
“The European Court of Human Rights says that French courts cannot behave in this way towards victims of sexual assault and sexual abuse, especially when they are minors,“ attorney Emmanuel Daoud told AFP.
But during hearings, “Julie was treated like the accused and asked why she had not physically resisted,“ he said.
A second victim accused two men aged 21 and 29 of raping her when she was 14 and a police report noted she was “clearly intoxicated”.
The third applicant reported that an 18-year-old raped her at her home when she was 16, but the proceedings were dropped for lack of sufficient evidence.
Consent-based rape law?
In December, a French court found 72-year-old Dominique Pelicot guilty of drugging his then wife Gisele for almost a decade so strangers he recruited online could rape her in her own bed while unconscious.
Advocates say this will enable the law to better hold perpetrators accountable but opponents say they fear the change will lead investigators to focus excessively on the victim’s behaviour.
Consent-based rape laws already exist in several European countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.
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