Outrage after ten-second grapese judgment in Rome

Outrage after ten-second grapese judgment in Rome

Title: "Found about acquittal - Italian dish is trivializing sexual harassment"

Stand: 13.07.2023 4:01 pm

A caretaker grabbed a student, she filed a complaint. Now he has been acquitted in Rome - on the grounds that the touch was only five to ten seconds. The anger over it is great.

The anger of the students and students gets air in front of the Roberto Rossellini school. A good dozen has come to demonstrate here against a judgment that the women in Italy in particular brings to the palm, like student Carlotta: "This is the mirror of a society that we have to experience every day. She condemns women to live as a victim and even if you are bothered, for fear that you will be blamed yourself."

To understand the anger of Carlotta and her fellow campaigners, you have to look back in April 2022. The scene: the Roberto Rossellini school. A 17-year-old student goes into the classroom with a friend and feels how someone reaches into her underpants from behind and gropes her buttocks. It is the school's caretaker. The young woman brings the case to the case.

Now a court in Rome judged: Since the touch took between five and ten seconds, the criminal offense of a sexual harassment was not fulfilled. For Elisa Ercoli, President of the Women's Rights Organization "Differenta Donne", this judgment is an expression of a culture that trivializes violence against women.

"It is harassment in every respect. The judge has also confirmed that this violation of the woman's intimate sphere. We do not understand this interpretation, we contradict her," says Ercoli.

The court actually sees the attack as proven, but it was "awkward behavior without sexual motive" on the part of the defendant. He himself spoke of a "joke without bad intentions".

In Italy, sexual harassment is a criminal offense. It is not specified how long the harassment must take to be recognized as such. The fact that a court in Rome now defines a minimum duration of ten seconds is literally screaming for creative protest.

For example, the video of a young couple on Instagram: he reaches on your buttocks. She says: "You grapese, I'll show you." He, with a look at the clock: "I still have nine seconds." She replies: "Ah, sorry, you are right, it is not a crime under ten seconds."

The actor and writer Paolo Camilli makes the hashtag "10secondi" popular. Prominent solidarity with the young woman by grapping herself in videos and let the stopwatch run. Ten seconds are damn long.

The acquittal means that the caretaker can work again in his old school Roberto Rossellini. The public prosecutor had requested three and a half years in prison. The young woman apparently wants to appeal against the judgment. According to her defender, she does not want to accept that such an act is not punished as a crime.