Sorry to lay such a depressing story on you first thing on a Monday, but this shit is insane.
A court in Italy has ruled that sexually abusing a woman isn’t as serious a crime if the victim isn’t a virgin. The case involved a man in his forties who forced his 14 year-old stepdaughter to have oral sex with him. The man--who was only sentenced to three years in jail--brought forward an appeal arguing that the fact that his stepdaughter had had sex before should have been taken into consideration during in his trial.
Unbelievably, the supreme court agreed, noting that the victim’s “personality, from a sexual point of view, is much more developed than what would be normally expected of a girl of her age” and that the damage done to the victim “would be lower.”
You know, cause once we’ve had sex rape isn’t such a big deal.
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Is the judgement really that unbelievable? I think there are two ways to look at this. The one that comes immediately to mind is that a woman's previous sexual history is being used to diminish the severity of the crime. Granted, this is a horrid perspective.
However, what do commenters here say is a worse crime - the sex being forced on a girl who has already had sexual experiences (hopefully positive) and is a little better equipped to handle the crime by having other experiences to balance out the negative sexual assault or is it worse to have the girl's only sexual experience be the sexual assault and allow this to taint all her future expectations?
If the legal code is presuming that 14 year old girls are virgins and that any sexual assaults are going to be more traumatic simply from lack of previous reference experiences, then when presented with evidence that this isn't the case the penalty should be different. You can look at this from the alternative angle, if you like, that the penalty should be increased if the victim is a virgin, for more harm has been done.
Please save the boilerplate that all sex crimes are horrid. I know. I'm asking if a horrid event can be even more horrid if it becomes the only thing you know about sex.
TangoMan, I think you raise a really interesting point. I was thinking about the same thing when I read the story.
The danger of viewing a woman's previous sexual experience as a "mitigating circumstance" is that it implies that the woman is less "worthy" as a victim, that somehow she doesn't deserve the same consideration or respect as a virgin. It plays into the wretched idea that a woman's worth is tied to her virginity or lack thereof.
I would be slightly less offended by this if a victim's lack of prior experience were something that could be said to be an AGGRAVATING circumstance. In other words, the sentence could be INCREASED if the victim were a virgin, not DECREASED if the victim weren't a virgin. Under that scenario, the victim's prior sexual experience couldn't be used against her and in favor of the rapist. But if she's a virgin, then perhaps that fact could be used to increase the rapist's sentence.
I am not sure I am comfortable with that, but it would certainly be preferable to introducing evidence of a victim's prior sexual conduct and making the court proceedings about making the victim out to be a "slut."