The man, identified by local media like Khaldoun F., was cleared of the rape charges on Tuesday. in a statement, the Rotterdam court said it restricted the “victim’s personal freedom and abused the trust she had placed in him” and put her at risk of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. He also said a broad interpretation of the law would be needed to include condomless sexual penetration under rape laws.
The case — the first conviction for shoplifting in the Netherlands, according to Dutch media — it is part of a growing global awareness of the nuances of consent. Experts say that although the term stealth is not widely known, the experience is relatively common, with surveys indicating incidence rates ranging from 8 to 43 percent for women and 5 to 19 percent for men who have sex with men, according to one recent review article which analyzed data from around the world.
In a 2017 article by Alexandra Brodsky, a civil rights attorney who introduced the term into mainstream discourse, victims called the act “adjacent rape” and described it as a violation of bodily autonomy. However, the sigil is still subject to debates about whether to ban it and how to classify it legally.
There have been efforts to legally penalize theft perpetrators in various countries, including Singapore, Swiss, Canada and parts of Australia — but the crime is not included in the penal code of the Netherlands, where about 3 percent of people experience physical sexual violence each year, according to one Statistics Netherlands 2020 Report.
In the United States, federal legislation that would have allowed victims to seek compensation for theft was introduced in the House of Representatives last spring, but it has not passed committee. states like NY and Wisconsin have tried to pass legislation that would punish shoplifting, but so far only California It has. In 2021, the state expanded its sexual assault laws to include what is also known as non-consensual condom removal, or NCCR, and to allow victims to sue for civil damages.
Kelly Cue Davis, a clinical psychologist and professor at Arizona State University who has studied stealth, said the decision in the Dutch case reflects the complexity of the act.
“What we are seeing in this particular court case is what many people who have experienced stealth have faced,” he said, noting that many victims are unsure what to make of their experience. “The person who is secretive agrees to have sex, but agrees to have it in this particular way. And so that’s not the way it happens.”
There’s also “a lot of confusion because people don’t know what to call it. People have not heard of him before. They just know that he feels bad,” he said.
that confusion and the deceptive nature of the act makes stealth particularly underreported, Davis said. Some victims don’t know they’ve experienced stealth until their partner tells them, they find out they’re pregnant or have a sexually transmitted infection, or potentially never at all.
“Obviously, that’s really problematic in terms of being able to seek help from law enforcement, but also being able to get any kind of necessary medical care in a timely manner,” he said.
Tuesday’s conviction relied heavily on WhatsApp messages between Khaldoun and the victim, during which she asked him if he had a sexually transmitted disease and expressed concern about him removing his condom, to which he claimed that he thought she “felt it”.
In another case, a 25-year-old man was acquitted because the Dutch court was “not convinced” that the defendant had made a “conscious choice” to remove the condom without his partner’s knowledge.
Amar Nadhir contributed to this report.