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Kissing a stranger's hand ruled sexual assault by Spanish Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of Spain has ruled that a man kissing the hand of a female stranger without consent constitutes sexual assault.
The case dates back to Jan. 10, 2023, when a man approached a woman at a bus stop in Madrid, kissed her hand and made gestures for her to follow him, indicating he would pay her. He did this twice.
A local court found the man guilty of sexual assault and fined him 1,620 euros (about $2,600), but he appealed, and the case made its way to the country’s Supreme Court , which upheld the ruling in March.
According to news reports, court documents said the man argued that the victim “might have felt bothered, offended, victim of an intrusion into her comfort zone, but there was never a clear risk for her sexual integrity.”
He also argued that the incident had occurred in a public place, near a police station and in full daylight, and might thus be considered harassment of a sexual nature in a public place, or “street harassment,” a lesser charge.
However, the Supreme Court noted that “there was an act of touching by the aggressor of the victim, and this excludes street harassment.”
No woman, the court added, “has a duty to tolerate a man taking and kissing her hand without her consent when the act has a sexual connotation. The Court states it thus, without ambiguity.”
The Spanish legal website Confilegal.com examined the ruling and said the court had listed six criteria for the charge.
It concluded : “The practical rule that emerges from the six criteria is clear: conduct ‘ad extra’ to the victim’s body — gestures, expressions, propositions without physical contact — is street harassment; conduct ‘ad intra’ — touching, however slight — is sexual assault.”
Confilegal also noted that two of the Supreme Court judges held a dissenting opinion. While they “do not dispute that the victim did not give her consent nor that the defendant’s conduct was reprehensible,” they also noted: “(a) kiss on the hand is not, objectively, an act of a sexual nature in our culture. And if the act lacks a sexual nature, it cannot harm the sexual freedom of the victim.”
Those judges argued that a kiss on the hand is, historically, a form of courtesy, and that no outside observer would identify it as a sexual act, whether consensual or not.
“The dissenting judges warn of the risk involved in the majority position: equating any non-consensual physical contact with an act of sexual significance does not strengthen the protection of victims, but rather weakens it, because it trivializes the meaning of what truly has a sexual nature,” the site noted.
Spain passed legislation in 2022, known as the “Only Yes Means Yes” law, which placed emphasis on the need for consent and eliminated the need to prove that there had been violence or intimidation in order for an encounter to be deemed sexual assault.
Last year, a Spanish court convicted the former head of the Spanish Football Federation, Luis Rubiales, of sexual assault over an unsolicited kiss on the lips to forward Jenni Hermoso during the 2023 Women’s World Cup in Sydney. He was fined 10,800 euros (about $17,370).
Rubiales, who had been facing a possible two-and-a-half-year jail sentence for the act, was also forbidden to go within 200 metres of Hermoso or to contact her for a year.
He had insisted the kiss after the final in Sydney was consensual. “I am absolutely sure that she gave me her permission,” he told a court in Madrid last year. “In that moment, it was something completely spontaneous.”
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