France’s highest court has ruled that firefighters accused of raping a girl when she was aged between 13 and 15 should be charged with the lesser offence of sexual assault, reports The Guardian.
A woman known as Julie claims she was raped over a period of two years after being groomed by a firefighter in 2008, when she was a girl aged 13, and that he later introduced her to his colleagues. Three accused men have admitted having sex with her but say it was consensual. Seventeen others have not been charged.
On Wednesday, the cour de cassation, France’s supreme appeal court, rejected an appeal by Julie’s lawyers that the accused should be tried for rape. The judges said it was not proven the men had used “moral constraint”.
The judgment, which Julie’s lawyers attacked as based on “archaic ideology”, came days after the Assemblée Nationale, the lower house of the French parliament, voted unanimously for a new law that set at 15 the age under which no child can be considered to have consented to sexual relations. The legislation was drawn up after a number of sexual abuse and incest scandals involving underage children.
Julie says she was raped by the firefighters between the ages of 13 and 15. Three of them were initially put under official investigation for “rape and sexual assault on a minor of 15 as a group” but a judge later reclassified the charges as “sexual assault without violence, constraint, threat or surprise”.
Julie’s lawyers say the family intends to take the case to the European court of human rights.
“The cour de cassation had lots of other options … it could have upheld the need to look at assessing the consent of the victim when she is a vulnerable minor in a state of great psychological distress,” they wrote in a statement.
“It could also have taken into account the reality of the facts, and the reality of what Julie suffered. They should have made a judgment based on the behaviour and the actions of the firefighters who are accused, all adult who treated Julie as a sexual object.”