Ex-footballer Alves: 4.5 years for rape
The former Brazilian football star Dani Alves was sentenced last Thursday to four and a half years in prison and ordered to pay 150,000 euros in compensation. The court in Barcelona considered it proven that Alves had raped a woman in a nightclub at the end of December 2022. Alves plans to appeal the decision. The Spanish press takes a very different view of his punishment.
Real change in this country
El País applauds the judgement:
“The fact that a judgement has incorporated the feminist concept of consent – the word appears 27 times in the text – shows how much things have changed in a country where the law failed to offer women adequate protection. ... 'For a sexual assault to have occurred, it need not be proven that the victim sustained physical injury or put up heroic resistance to sexual intercourse,' the sentence eloquently states. The judgment has a clear educational value. It places the 'only yes means yes' principle enshrined in the law on sexual freedom at the centre of its argumentation and at the same time illustrates a significant evolution of justice.”
Why minimum punishment?
Outraged by the lenient sentence, El Español comments:
“Alves is the type of man who believes that if they pay for a separate room, everything in it belongs to them. This sentence hasn't changed that. ... If the rapist had not been able to pay the 150,000 euros ordered by the court, the sentence would have been harsher. Despite the careful wording of the judgement, in which we are told that a 'provocative dance' is not carte blanche to throw a person to the ground and penetrate them, the mildest possible punishment was handed down. Four and a half of the potential twelve years for the player who tried to force a woman to perform fellatio on him, slapped and insulted her and finally flipped her over, forcibly penetrating and ejaculating inside her.”