A legal loophole for pedophiles

La Vie

Can an 11-year-old girl consent to sexual intercourse? asked Olivia Elkaim. Most French people would surely say no. Yet last month, prosecutors in Pontoise said that a 28-year-old man who lured his 11-year-old neighbor to his apartment and had sex with her could not be charged with raping a minor, because the sex was supposedly “consensual.” Prosecutors charged him instead with assaulting a minor, meaning he could get five years in prison instead of 20. The investigators said there was no proof that the man used “violence, coercion, threat, or surprise,” and so, under French law, that makes the sixth-grader a willing

participant. Police even cited text messages of a sexually suggestive nature that the girl had once sent to a friend as evidence that she willingly submitted. The case “has provoked outrage” across France. Psychiatrists say current French law is simply “not adapted to the psychological situation of children.” Children may indeed exhibit sexual curiosity, but they aren’t emotionally equipped to stand up to adults. Activists are now calling for a statutory rape law, which most other Western countries have, to set an age below which consent to sexual relations is not legally possible. It should not be the child’s responsibility to explicitly say no.