An Italian judge has acquitted two 19-year-old boys who raped an 18-year-old girl in Florence.They had “a misperception of consent”, literally says the sentence. According to their testimony, the young woman had been drinking and wanted to have sex, since a month before she and she voluntarily had sex with one of them. However, this time it was different. during the rape asked on several occasions to stop, according to collect several Italian media.

Altamira Gonzaloa lawyer and partner of Themis, assesses the decision of the Italian court as follows: “It is incredible that in the 21st centuryafter three centuries of feminist struggle, we have to read in a sentence that some big men believed they had the right to rape a woman”.

Despite the acquittal the judge does recognize that there was violent behavior by the boys, but justifies them. He says that the rapists are “conditioned by an inadmissible pornographic conception of their relations with the female gender derived, perhaps, from an educational deficit and in any case the result of a very distorted conception of sex”.

That is to say, it is not their fault: they have grown up like this. Pornography has made them so. “It is the last straw since sexually uneducating, educating in inequality, in the domination of men over women, on top of that serves as a justification for them to rape women and be acquitted for it,” Gonzalo sentenced.

Not the first, not the last

This judicial decision has unleashed a wave of indignation in Italy. In recent months, other magistrates have handed down sentences in favor of the rapist or abuser and against the women. At the beginning of the summer, this time in Rome, a judge acquitted a 66-year-old man, a janitor at a high school, despite having groped a student under her panties from the center of just 17 years as she climbed the stairs. She considered that it was “for a short time”, since it lasted less than ten seconds, and that the man did it as a joke.

From Themis they see a relationship between these failures and the policy “that the extreme right is doing in Italy: a denialist policy of sexist violence. And when sexist violence is denied from the institutions, these things happen.”