Meeting in Luxembourg on Friday 17 October for the ‘Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs’ Council (EPSCO), the European ministers for equality reopened the thorny issue of the notion of consent in the fight against sexual violence.
In an interview with Agence Europe - to be published on Monday 20 October - the Danish Minister for the Environment and Gender Equality, Magnus Heunicke, regretted that the 2024 directive did not include a European definition of rape based on consent. However, he welcomed the progress made at national level: “Denmark and many other countries just in the last three or four or five years have introduced this consent based rape definition in their legislation”, and the data shows that there have been no unfair court rulings, “not in Denmark, not in other countries”.
In his opinion, “much more action” is needed to transform this standard into real safety for women, and this should start as soon as the directive is transposed in 2027.
Following the EU Council meeting, the Commissioner for Equality, Hadja Lahbib, called for continued mobilisation despite the backlash against women’s rights.
“We are at a point in our history where we seem to be moving forward by going backwards (...) There is no question of going backwards”, she stated at a press conference.
She pointed out that the defence of women’s rights, the fight against sexual violence and attention to the “grey areas” of consent are among the priorities of the future ‘post-2025 European strategy’.
The Commissioner also spoke about the fight against gender stereotypes, presented by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). These “have a profound influence on our lives, sometimes in extremely vicious ways, from the earliest years”, she said, pointing out that “one in three women in the EU” has experienced physical violence, threats or sexual violence in her lifetime (see EUROPE 13537/21).
The ministers discussed education, controlling access to pornography and the supervision of artificial intelligence.
Conclusions adopted to implement the 2024 directive. The ministers also adopted conclusions to improve prevention, early detection and intervention in cases of violence against women and domestic violence, and to improve application of the directive against gender-based and domestic violence, the first European standard in this area, which came into force in 2024 (see EUROPE 13431/33).
The EU Council is calling for more training for professionals, awareness-raising among the public and witnesses, protection for children at risk, promotion of women’s economic empowerment and improved data collection.
“Today we have agreed to strengthen prevention, early detection and intervention (...). Everyone has a role to play in breaking the silence”, stressed Magnus Heunicke.
The conclusions also call for greater involvement of men and boys, who can also be victims of both violence and stereotypes. The aim is to integrate these priorities into the ‘European Gender Equality Strategy post-2025’.
The conclusions: https://aeur.eu/f/j1b (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)