By local media Khaldoon F. The man, identified as , was acquitted of rape charges on Tuesday. In a statement, the Rotterdam court said she had “restricted the victim’s personal liberty and abused the trust placed in her” and put her at risk of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. It also said that including sexual penetration without a condom under rape laws would require a broad interpretation of the law.
Case , According to Dutch media, the first theft conviction in the Netherlands , Part of a growing global awareness of the nuances of consent. Experts say that although the term stealthing is not widely known, The experience is relatively common, with surveys indicating incidence rates of 8 to 43 percent of women and 5 to 19 percent of men who have had sex with men, according to a recent review article that looked at data from around the world. .
in a 2017 paper by Civil rights lawyer Alexandra Brodsky pushed the term into mainstream discourse, with victims calling the act “rape-adjacent” and describing it as a violation of bodily autonomy. Yet stealthing remains a matter of debate as to whether it should be outlawed and how to legally classify it.
Attempts have been made to legally punish perpetrators of piracy in several countries, including Singapore, Switzerland, Canada and parts of Australia – but the offense is not included in the criminal code in the Netherlands, where around 3 per cent of people experience physical sexual violence per year, according to a 2020 report by Statistics Netherlands.
In the United States, federal legislation that would allow victims to seek compensation for burglary was introduced in the House last spring, but has not made it past committee. States such as New York and Wisconsin have attempted to pass laws that would punish those who steal, but so far only California has done so. In 2021, the state expanded its sexual battery laws to include non-consensual condom removal, or NCCR, and allowed victims to sue for civil damages.
Kelly Q. Davis, a clinical psychologist and professor at Arizona State University who has studied stealthing, said the decision in the Dutch case illustrates the complexity of the act.
“What we’re seeing play out in this particular court case is a lot of people who have experienced burglary,” she said, noting that many victims aren’t sure what to do with their experience. “The person who steals agrees to have sex, but they agree to do it in this particular way. And then it doesn’t happen.
There’s also “a lot of confusion because people don’t know what to call it. People haven’t heard of it before. They just know it sounds bad,” she said.
that illusion and Davis said the deceptive nature of the act makes piracy particularly underreported. Some sufferers don’t know until their partner tells them, they discover they are pregnant or have a sexually transmitted infection – or, potentially, never.
“Obviously, it’s really problematic in terms of being able to seek help from law enforcement, but also being able to get any sort of needed health care provision in a timely manner,” she said.
Tuesday’s sentencing was based largely on WhatsApp messages between Khaldoon and the victim, during which he asked if she had a sexually transmitted disease and expressed concern about removing the condom, which she claimed she thought had “Feeled it.”
In a separate case, a 25-year-old man was acquitted because a Dutch court was “not convinced” the defendant made a “conscious choice” to remove the condom without his partner’s knowledge.
Amar Nadir contributed to this report.