(source)
[T]he Connecticut State Supreme Court overturned the sexual assault conviction of a man who had sex with a woman who “has severe cerebral palsy, has the intellectual functional equivalent of a 3-year-old and cannot verbally communicate.” The Court held that, because Connecticut statutes define physical incapacity for the purpose of sexual assault as “unconscious or for any other reason … physically unable to communicate unwillingness to an act,” the defendant could not be convicted if there was any chance that the victim could have communicated her lack of consent. Since the victim in this case was capable of “biting, kicking, scratching, screeching, groaning or gesturing,” the Court ruled that that victim could have communicated lack of consent despite her serious mental deficiencies. (source)
This is outrageous. Lack of physical resistance is not evidence of consent, nor should it be. If you require rape victims to fight back you’ll only cause more violence and more harm since attackers will answer violence with violence. Rape victims should not be asked to go to such lengths in order to prove that they did not consent. And in any case, one has to assume lack of consent in the case of people with a mental defect, as in the example above. The same is true for people under the statutory age of consent.
More absurd human rights violations here.
