“We must consider that, until proven otherwise, women’s bodies are not available,” says environmentalist senator Mélanie Vogel

According to the elected official, “the fact that we are not obliged to demonstrate that there was consent is a legal loophole into which lawyers are rushing.”

“We must consider that, until proven otherwise, women’s bodies are not available”asserts on franceinfo, Friday September 27, the environmentalist senator Mélanie Vogel, who tabled a bill in December 2023 to recognize the absence of consent as a constituent element of sexual assault and rape. The new Minister of Justice, Didier Migaud, spoke out in favor of this inclusion of the notion of consent in the penal code, on France Inter.

Currently, French law defines rape as “any act of sexual penetration, of whatever nature, or any oral-genital act committed on the person of another or on the person of the perpetrator by violence, coercion, threat or surprise”. For Mélanie Vogel, “the Penal Code is, in a society, what determines what we consider admissible or not”. In this case, “the way we wrote the definition of rape is, somewhere, to say that until proven otherwise, the body of others is available, in particular the body of women”she continues.

Like the reform of the law on sexual consent adopted in Spain in 2023, the environmentalist senator explains that “consent must be active”. “The fact that someone did not resist, did not say no, is not enough” to prove that there was no rape, she emphasizes. “If you have a case where there is a person who is in a state of astonishment and who does not react, which happens very often, we could classify it as rape”she adds.

Mélanie Vogel specifies that “the absence of consent is an additional criterion to the criteria that exist today”that he “don’t replace them”but that “demonstrating that there was no consent would be enough to define rape”. According to her, “the fact that we are not obliged to demonstrate that there was consent is a legal loophole into which the defense lawyers are rushing” during trials, such as that of the Mazan rapes.

In France, 96% of rape complaints are dismissed, according to a study by the Institute of Public Policies covering the period from 2012 to 2021. “It would certainly make it possible to convict rapists who escape justice, because it would allow, in police investigations and in trials, to focus on whether there was consent or not”declares Mélanie Vogel.