On April 26, 2018, the sentence was read for those accused of “alleged” multiple rape of an 18-year-old woman in San Fermín (Pamplona, ​​Spain), 2016. The self-named Manada faces just 9 years in prison, from which the 2 years they have spent prisoners in the course of the trial are to be subtracted.

An entire country waited for almost two years for the judges to punish these sexual offenders taking into account: the victim’s testimony, the videos of the crime filmed by the aggressors themselves and the distribution of these videos; taking into account their premeditated plans evidenced in their group chat, of testimonies, of their background, of the theft of the victim’s cell phone. Evidence of all types of violations: property, privacy, honor, rape.

But the evidence did not prove to the magistrates that the gang rape was not consented, that she did not want it, that she did not enjoy it, that she felt intimidated by 5 large men who were willing to do anything to obtain sexual satisfaction from her body. This evidence that, for public opinion, the prosecution, the City Council of Pamplona and the Government of Navarra, are sufficient to condemn them to the maximum penalty; but the resulting sentence and the request of Judge González for its absolution demonstrates the weight male chauvinism has in the balance of Spanish justice. Since she did not fight, since she did not defend herself, since supposedly there was no violence or intimidation, it was not aggression, only abuse: “the violence requires a physical aggression with force to bend the will of the complainant, what they consider [the Court] has not been accredited. ”

The sentence was so wrong that it got international attention: the message was clear to the thousands of people who took protest from social media to the streets or extended a # YoSíTeCreo (I believe you) to the victim, “if you resist, they kill you, if you don’t put up resistance to survive, they say it’s consent.” They have led us to question, mainly women, how much we have to resist to avoid rape without putting our lives at risk, but that we get enough marks on our bodies to prove that we didn’t want it. We have been given a parameter of how we should force our body to react since entering into a state of shock now means consent. They have established that filming you while they rape you and sharing it on social networks is not violence. They have hinted that leaving you abused, dumped, naked, robbed, but not dead, is not so serious.

Definitely La Manada (The Pack) are not only the 5 rapists who were saved from a harsher sentence, not only were José Ángel Prenda, Alfonso Cabezuelo (military), Antonio Manuel Guerrero (civil guard), Jesús Escudero and Ángel Boza. Judges José Francisco Cobos, Ricardo Javier González and Raquel Fernandino Nosti, the last accomplices of this inexorable crime, joined La Manada.

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