The Social Memory of Sexual Violence: “You Touch One,You Touch Us All”

On the Communicative Power of Violence

Discourse analysts see speech as a social action, but physical actions can also be analyzed semiotically (Blommaert & Huang, 2009), that is, as containing a message. According to Segato (2013, pp. 31–32), “acts of violence behave as a language capable of functioning effectively for those who understand, (…) even if they do not participate directly in the enunciative action.” She identifies two types of messages the authors of a sexual assault send: one to the victim, in terms of superiority or power; and one to their peers, other men, to whom they instantiate masculinity. Thus, the definition of gender roles is constructed to a great degree on the use of violence, or, in other words, gender operates as a system of social, material, and also discursive (Juliano, 2017) inequalities that “tends to reinforce and stabilize itself through aggression” (Amigot Leache, 2022, p. 3) and legitimizes itself through symbolic and discursive structures (Bourdieu, 2001).

Violence tells us what our place is within this order. It also contains a disciplining message: each assault, especially those in the public sphere, reminds women of the constant threat to which they are subjected, thus functioning as a mnemonic device that carries a series of meanings through time, space, and bodies. The semiotic content behind the physical violence operates as a continuous reenactment of the warning and doctrinal message that is already rooted into social memory as common-sense knowledge, and thus does not need to be made explicit through words; it is the physical act that substitutes them. This discipline of sexual terror (Barjola, 2018) involves a subtext or implicit warning, often instantiated in conventional norms such as “Don’t go home alone,” which women apprehend and interiorize by avoiding certain actions and attitudes they would otherwise feel free to adopt. Therefore, the sexist order of society implies a learning process of this “universe of meanings” (Segato, 2013, p. 21) structured around the concepts of domination and control.

Hence, when five men aged 24 to 28—including a member of the army and another of the Spanish military police, the Guardia Civil, both off-duty—gang-raped an 18-year-old woman during the first night of the internationally known San Fermin festival in Pamplona (Navarre, Spain), they carried out a clear exercise of power. After the assault, the woman sought help, and the local police had arrested the group by the morning of July 7, 2016.

The case immediately gained attention from the media, and multitudinous protests took place following the arrests, which soon evolved into a discursive and conceptual battle about the nature of the violence. Most media coverage at the time evinced the prevalence of a framework of exceptionality (Agamben, 1998), which included a contextualization of the violence in its particular circumstances, highlighting elements such as the time of night it took place, the broader context of the festivity, and the space at which the assault took place, as possible causes of the rape.

The disciplinary power of media discourses, as described by Barjola (2018), also became evident in the early coverage following the aggression. The concept of rape was reinstantiated using explicit verbal descriptions and visual elements. Most newspapers echoed the declaration of the victim, filtered by the police, publishing headlines such as “A collective and turn-taking rape” (Diario de Noticias, August 10, p. 5) or highlighting direct quotes such as:

1) I began to feel uncomfortable because they started grabbing my shoulders and arms. I tried to go down another street in order to get away from them, but they insisted on accompanying me. / One grabbed me by the hip and the other by the neck. I was blocked by the situation. /I tried to escape, but I couldn’t. They covered my mouth so I wouldn’t scream. Once inside the doorway they surrounded me and threw me onto the ground. (Diario de Navarra, July 15, p. 18)

The authorial voice of this text (Martin & White, 2005, p. 94) is assumed to be the victim. The excerpts that were chosen and highlighted for publication by the journalists/editors certainly have a great interpellating power. Specifically, they clearly display two forms of subjectivity or positions (Van Langenhove & Harré, 1999, p. 16): a passive victim subject and a dominant outgroup of assailants. A discursive position is a metaphorical concept that assumes that any narrative or discursive act places the speakers in a specific space in which the features that construct their current subjectivity are gathered. Positioning is the outcome of the ongoing discursive process of negotiating these identities “both on the microlevel of conversation and the macrosociopolitical level” (Bamberg, 1997, p. 336).

The quotes show an unequal distribution of power among the actors categorized as victims and aggressors, which in discourse can be observed through the references to agency, that is, the “degree of control” (Pfleger, 2021, p. 331) actors have in order to influence the (communicative) action. This becomes evident in the use of certain verbs as well as through modality (Marín-Arrese, 2011; Martín-Zorraquino & Portolés, 1999). The verbal structures attached to the victim's attitude all indicate an impossibility to influence the situation: statements such as “I tried,” “I couldn’t,” and “I was blocked” refer to her lack of agency. On the contrary, active verbs such as “they started grabbing” and “they insisted” highlight the power of the rapists, as well as an objectification of the body of the woman: namely, declarations like “one grabbed me,” “they covered my mouth,” and “they threw me onto the floor.” The image of a woman unable to “scream,” that is, to make her voice heard, metaphorizes the repression of freedom involved in a crime against sexual liberties.

The First Reactions in the Media: A Narrative of Exceptionality

Such media reports highlighted a prototypical image of rape: a very violent assault in which the assailant has absolute power over the victim, who cannot defend herself. Many were also illustrated with pictures of the scene of the rape, leading to a continuous restaging of the violence, of narratives that “in-corporate sexual terror, that is, manage to translate to the body” (Barjola, 2018, p. 26) the violations suffered by the victims in detail. These communicative practices, semiotically charged actions with a history of similar representations, form “historical bodies,” that is, “accumulations of experience that make people perform actions with a greater or lesser facility” (Wong-Scollon & De Saint-Georges, 2012, pp. 71–72) and generate similar reactions and affectivities. Collective meanings are thus an embodied memory that is rewritten both through the attack on the physical body and through the mediated restaging of that violence in public discourse, becoming shared experiences insofar as they represent shared meanings for the totality of women who are exposed to these discourses.

In fact, our shared framework or mental model of rape is intensely shaped by social stereotypes and traditional understandings of sexual violence. Lonsway and Fitzgerald (1994, p. 134) define these as rape myths or “attitudes and beliefs that are generally false but are widely and persistently held that serve to deny and justify male sexual aggression against women.” Grubb and Turner (2012) list a number of recurrent discursive structures, such as blaming the victim or only believing her when certain characteristics are met. This thesis is consistent with the concept of cultural violence developed by Galtung (1990), which argues that all physical violence has at least one underlying justifying discourse. Brandariz Portela (2021, p. 579) further suggests that “the patriarchal narrative about rape is articulated around the idea that women are to blame for sexual violence because they could have avoided it if their behavior was what the patriarchy understands as appropriate; or if they had not occupied a space that does not belong to them: the public.” Home is falsely represented as a safe space, which leads Barjola (2018, p. 267) to argue that, “what is actually protected is the hetero-sexist system.”

In order to sustain this view of society as a generally safe place as long as everyone fulfills their expected role, sexual violence must be conceptualized in terms of an exception, not as a norm. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the San Fermin 2016 gang rape, a number of analytical and op-ed articles were published stressing the exceptionality of the event:

2) Rape is a thing of some men

These articles, both written by men, draw a clear distinction between them, the aggressors, and we, the good men. This categorization of actors can be observed through the use of self-distancing markers such as spatial deictics (“there are men” in excerpt 2 and “those sexual aggressors” in excerpt 3); the emphasis on exceptionality through the repeated use of the determiner “some (men)”; and a clear evaluative stance when describing the outgroup's actions (“disgusting,” “unfortunate”), while at the same time self-categorizing oneself as a sensitive subject (“it hurts”).

We can also observe a clear distinction in the use of verb conjugation, as the third person is employed for the outgroup. In fact, both excerpts contain metaphorizations of irrationality, characterizing the outgroup as “beasts” and their attitudes as “madness.” The metaphorical reference to their emotional “imbalance” also entails an opposition to stability and rationality, both related to a normal and correct function of civic and social life. Thus, aggressors are presented as exceptional subjects with personal frustrations (that is, unsatisfied goals or unfulfilled lives) who do not fit society's standards. The war metaphor “to gain ground on [them]” builds on a framework of competition: it is their territory against our territory, but always within these two categories of men. Thus, a clear differentiating line is drawn between the ingroup (we, the good men who need to collaborate) and the outgroup (the crazy aggressors), while the agency of women is barely visibilized. On the contrary, the text contains a clear sexualization of women, since, on all three occasions they are mentioned, they are related to an image of nudity. Thus, the problem continues to be conceptualized in terms of sexuality, carnality, or uncontrolled impulses, rather than in terms of rights and freedoms.

At the same time, however, the fact that the detainees transmitted an image of normal young men also produced surprise among the media. The local daily Diario de Noticias de Navarra considered it noteworthy that “they were well dressed, some of them have an easily recognizable hairstyle, another has a visible tattoo, and at least two of them have beards” (July 9 edition, p. 4), or that they attended court “elegantly dressed” (November 28, 2017 edition, p. 7). These attributes, although remarked on as personal traits, do not represent an unusual image of what could be expected from an average young man in Spain back in 2016, especially because the description did not include any details about the form of the tattoos or any other particular aesthetic choice that could facilitate any inference about the person's ideology, background, or attitudes. It contributed to a characterization of ordinary young men, an image that initially contrasted with the previously mentioned dehumanizing stereotype about rapists as beasts.

In reality, gender-based violence—including sexual assault—is far from being exceptional (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2014). Moreover, rape is not something inherent or exclusive to the party scene, or to a particular festivity such as San Fermin (Zuloaga et al., 2018). In fact, violations of women's sexual liberties are much more common in private spheres (Brandariz Portela, 2021). Nevertheless, treating those assaults that occur in the public space as inherently different cases removes their political and historical background and makes their links to other types of violence against women invisible, especially if they are not framed as gender-based violence, but only as individualized incidents.

Much of the local feminist movements’ efforts concentrated on drawing attention to this normative aspect of violence in the midst of the mediatic storm catalyzed by the 2016 gang rape. Slogans such as “Sister, we are your pack of wolves” or “You touch one, you touch us all” dominated the banners of massive protests all over Spain, with the aim of overcoming the exceptionality discourse by building on a broader subjectivity on the grounds of solidarity and identification. These discursive formations were the voice of the aforementioned historical or collective body that had emerged through social (re)action in response to a long memory or trajectory of meanings regarding sexual terror, crystallizing the interaction between discourse, social action, and historical consciousness.

Although labeled as “spontaneous” by some media, these protests were anything but impromptu. On the contrary, the city of Pamplona had experienced a long history of activism against sexual violence, especially during its iconic San Fermin festival. San Fermin is a yearly 10-day-long popular festivity that is known for its morning bull runs. It is also the time of year in which most complaints of sexual harassment are registered in the city: according to a report published by the Public University of Navarre for the local city council, on average, 13.41% of all assaults are reported during the festival (Zuloaga et al., 2018, p. 3). However, the authors note that these figures are not visibly higher than those registered in other Spanish cities with similar festivities. In fact, what they consider noteworthy is a “rising tendency in the number of complaints” between 2014 and 2017: “We could detect a greater culture of reporting in Pamplona compared to the rest of the localities, which could be a reflection of the initiatives against sexual assaults, and which favors a perception of social support in the case of considering reporting” (Zuloaga et al., 2018, p. 7). Among the reasons for this rise in consciousness, they highlight a growing public awareness, since 2014, of sexual violence in the festival season, fueled by the controversial images of the chupinazo—the initial firing of the rocket that marks the beginning of San Fermin—a year prior, in which images of young women being grabbed among the mass of people at this opening event were published widely. According to the report, San Fermin is no more prone to being a space of harassment because of its specificities, but it is insofar that it facilitates these massive gatherings: “The fiestas are not disruptions of the ordinary. Instead, they reproduce sociocultural representations and practices of social reality in a condensed way, accentuating conflicts and discrimination: gender roles, power relations, exclusion of some populations, referentiality of men in events, reproduction of violence, sexual division of work and care, etc.” (Zuloaga et al., 2018, p. 4).

As such, San Fermin was already a “hot spot” for the local organizations that were active in the prevention of and response to sexual assaults, in the words of Begoña Zabala, a member of the local feminist movement. Since 2010, local groups and festival organizers had established a communication network through which they had agreed on a shared protocol (Velte, 2019, p. 101) that would be activated in the case of violent sexual assaults:

It caught us very mobilized, organized, and aware. We had already had so many experiences, also in the fiestas of villages and neighborhoods (…). When you are celebrating in the streets, in San Fermin, everything is great and everyone treats you well—you lower your guard. So it's important to make cartographies of aggressions: where they take place, which spaces those are, so we can start to realize, “here we can respond.” (Interview with Begoña Zabala, member of the group “Emakume Internazionalistak [Internationalist Women]”)

Zabala's words reflect, on one hand, a historical consciousness of sexual violence as a recurring practice. It is this collective memory that enables collective action, in the form of a response but also in the form of a metaphorical map, namely a textual and graphic device that allows other members of the collective body to trace back the itineraries of those meaning-loaded actions. Traumatic collective experiences that had occurred in Pamplona in previous years had proven the need for such joint work, especially the rape and murder of 20-year-old Nagore Laffage in 2008 and the awareness of a major discourse framing San Fermin as a festival in which “anything goes,” in the words of the coordinator of gender equality at the local city council. This social memory, in coordination with a highly effective organization, quickly activated a popular response as a new, broader collective subject was interpellated, beyond those groups that were usually active in feminist protests. This reaction was also influenced by a change in local administration policies from 2016 on, insofar that it had facilitated the transmission of knowledge about sexual assaults. Instead of hiding the number of incidents of sexual violence, the local government had decided that year to publicize them every morning of the festival, sending a clear submessage in line with feminist movements: violence is part of our everyday life. This perception became stronger in the context of similar movements around the world, such as the Argentinian movement Ni Una Menos (Francis, 2022).

However, most media discourses continued to point to it as an exception, showing that the narrative of exceptionality is a deeply rooted foundational myth of Western societies, which prefer to see violence against women as a “dark spot” or a “pending subject” (Diario de Noticias, July 16, p. 1) in a system that otherwise functions smoothly. “The assaults on women and the rejection of the people mark a San Fermin festivity with a good atmosphere,” wrote a local daily at the end of the festival, highlighting a positive global evaluation of a collective event in which a total of 16 men had been arrested because of several sexual assaults.

Before the Trial: Tensioning the Narrative Field

Although the topic continued to be discussed during the following months, the second informative spike came in the weeks before and during the oral trial in November 2017, which also coincided with the annual protests on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This agenda intensified the already remarkable focus on the case, with many more media outlets engaging in the informative competition.

As the trial approached, more narratives remarking on the human or normal side of the attackers came to light, substituting the monster narrative, which would again become dominant after the final ruling. This was partly due to the fact that newspapers and TV shows of many types echoed the public declarations of the defense attorneys, whose strategy was based on three main arguments: a discrediting of the victim; the use of an interpretative frame presenting the rape case as consensual sex; and a characterization of the defendants as actual victims of a major plot against them.

In fact, media reports quoting word-for-word the version of the attackers were widely published throughout most media outlets analyzed, and the main representative of their legal team was invited onto numerous talk shows on national television. Their voice, however mediated, reached large audiences, who, as media analyses of the time (Angulo Egea, 2019; Perez Soler, 2018; Velte, 2019) pointed out, often reproduced the original quotes without contextualization, thus building on a framework of a boxing ring, in which the problem was reduced to a scheme of conflicting, but equally powerful versions:

4) The defense justifies exonerating “the wolfpack” because the young woman realized a “sexual fantasy”

This article is almost exclusively structured around the voice of the perpetrators’ attorney. He speaks in the name of his clients, but also indirectly in the name of the victim, whom he presents as an irresponsible and infantilized actor who is not aware of the consequences of her actions, but who is nevertheless to blame for what happened. The attorney's voice provides a narrative and causal structuration of events, framing the assault in a narrative of consensual, but later regretted sex; in any case, the agency of the causes of the conflict is placed entirely on the woman and her wish to “realize a sexual fantasy.”

The putative reader (White, 2020) of this text is addressed through an interpellation (“let's”), characterizing the public as a moral judge and encouraging it to be more open-minded about the possible narratives regarding the case. This allows the narrator to conceptualize the conflict in terms of a public conspiracy (or hunt, drawing on the metaphor of the wolfpack) in which the aggressors are, actually, victims. Their innocence is highlighted through a benevolent characterization of them as simple-minded, even stupid subjects who therefore cannot be accused of any maliciousness. This polarizing categorization of actors evokes the memory of a deeply rooted cultural myth, namely the femme fatale, who manipulates men through the use of sex.

Interestingly, the journalist who had access to this source and used this discursive material in order to produce a text also appropriated some of these conceptual clusters and interpretative frames. It is interesting to observe, for example, that the metaphor parallel trial is not explicitly quoted, thus showing a greater commitment (Biber & Finegan, 1989; González et al., 2017) to its semantic content. Other metaphors, such as the pendulum and the night/day contrast, are also employed to illustrate a major narrative conceptualizing the debate as a conflict of versions. The position or gaze of the reader is thus compared to an oscillating object that swings from one side to the other, without providing any further information about the social or historical context in which the discussed events took place.

The myth of inherent simpleness (and, therefore, innocence) of men is also reactivated by the wolfpack metaphor. Although originating in the name of the WhatsApp group of the San Fermin rapists, the term quickly spread to everyday language, becoming a metonymy of any gang rape (Romano, 2022). However, some local media outlets, such as the Basque-language newspaper Berria, deliberately decided not to employ the term, because of its interdiscursive relations: by comparing a group of men who had attacked the freedom of a woman—because of the uncontested power they had in a given situation—with a group of animals, they were reactivating the social stereotype related to an alleged animal instinct of men. This topos comprises a justifying discourse of sexual violence, as it assumes that men who act by instinct lose control of the situation and, as such, it is the responsibility of women to avoid that point.

In sum, one cannot think of a trial or a social debate of this kind in terms of two independent, equally powerful actors unconstrained by their social and historical roles. Hence, the victims are never only battling against their rapists: they are also fighting against the social concept of rape and the foundational myths and imaginaries associated with it in the midst of a major social dispute about the legitimacy of representing the truth about violence, in which the actors involved are not only the material or physical attackers and victims, but also the public, who, through the lens offered by the media, is itself evaluating the case.

As Juliano (2017, p. 169) notes, “violence is always legitimized by attributing specificities and differences to the victims that would make them essentially ‘other’ than their perpetrators.” In the Pamplona case, as well as in many other cases of sexual violence, casting doubts was, on one hand, the only way of sparing the attackers from being convicted; and, on the other, it maintained a narrative tension. During the trial, the case became a major topic of discussion in daily talk shows, which dedicated hours to the question of whether the case had been rape or consensual sex. It soon became the most mediatic case that attorneys at the Regional Court of Navarre remembered in 20 years, with dozens of journalists piling up every morning in front of the closed courtroom doors, although the media and the public had been deliberately excluded in order to protect the intimacy of the people involved. Nonetheless, most of the material was filtered, giving rise to a competition of headlines and clicks, but also to an ideological battle (Liarte-Marín & Bandrés Goldáraz, 2019).

The Judgment and Its Particular Vote

The characterization of the actors involved became a major question during the 2-week-long trial. The argument was centered largely on the attitudes and actions of the victim, which, according to Camps Calvet and Moreno Beltrán (2019, p. 11), is a common pattern. Specifically, it was often questioned “whether the woman said no, resisted, or tried to escape,” and not “the behavior of the aggressors and if they perceived the young woman's consent.” Soon it became clear that the credibility incorporated and represented by both the victim and the perpetrators would become a key question. Reports of the time show, however, that the measure of this credibility was, to a large extent, its concordance with a social memory of preestablished mental schemes about victims and violence. For example, the Diario de Navarra published a report on November 18 titled “The assistants affirm that the young woman presented a clear victim profile,” which suggested a typical incorporation that could easily be classified as a credible testimony of suffering, including symptoms such as “depression, sadness, difficulty talking about what happened, and an urgent need to shower.” These evoke the traditional notion of psychic trauma (Terr, 1985; Van der Kolk et al., 1994), a necessary condition in order to be viewed as a credible victim.

Hence, most of the trial was centered on clearing up whether the woman showed signs of clear victimization, but the three judges’ final interpretation differed greatly. Two of them signed a condemnatory verdict, penalizing the attackers with charges of sexual abuse and condemning them to 9 years of prison. The third judge, however, issued an individual vote, written as an entire parallel verdict, in which he argued in favor of absolution. It reproduced many of the arguments exposed by the defense and interpreted the assault as

5) (…) an unsatisfactory and emotionally traumatic sexual relationship, maintained by a single woman with five strangers in a doorway, with an alcohol level higher than 1g/l and that ends [sic] with the abandonment of the woman in the doorway, leaving her alone and half naked, as well as the theft of a mobile phone, even if she had not refused to have [the sexual relationship], it could be a reasonable explanation for her emotional state after the events. (p. 301)

Within this text, the agency—and therefore, the responsibility of the events—is again placed on the woman, who appears as the main subject of the verb “maintain,” in which “sexual relationship” (a reformulation of rape) is the direct object, and the rapists, that is, “five strangers,” are an indirect object (replaced syntactically through a prepositional phrase). Her particularity is stressed through the adjective “single,” and the semantic content of the descriptive sequence in this excerpt portrays her as an emotionally unstable and, therefore, unreliable witness. This is enhanced by the references to her alcohol intake and her alleged active engagement with strangers, which are both a clear transgression of gender rules. Both rely on two cultural warning messages: do not drink too much and do not engage with strangers, as both these actions are conceptualized as risk factors for suffering a sexual assault. In this case, the main thesis of the excerpt is contained in a negation: that the woman might have consented. This thesis is supported by the characterization of a transgressing or bad woman described previously.

Earlier literature (Ehrlich, 1999) has shown how courtroom procedures can reframe or resemanticize the victims’ narratives. In this case, too, many of the discourses socialized through the trial generated much social outrage, leading protestors to respond with slogans such as “They were not five [rapists], the judge is there as well,” pointing at the judge who had issued the individual vote arguing for absolution. However, it needs to be noted that, although the main verdict had sentenced the five rapists for the crime of abuse, it also included a number of these patterns or myths related to the idea of a credible violation, such as:

6) The personality of the complainant is characterized by being lively, spontaneous, and daring; she often fancies initiating interpersonal contacts. She tends to be less controlled and, therefore, to make more mistakes or errors. On the date of the events, she was at the beginning of her sexual life, she had never had sexual relations in a group or with unknown people, and in no case had she been penetrated anally. She had no previous history of psychological destabilization (…). (p. 77)

This fragment was included by the two judges who signed the official verdict in the section of proven facts. It sums up their perception of the victim's attitudes and lifestyle, which also stresses her inexperience and lightheartedness (being “spontaneous and daring” or “less controlled”) and relates the case to the possibility of her making “mistakes.” This information is presented as relevant to the interpretation of facts: although its semantic content is completely independent of the development of events on the July 7 rape, it constitutes part of the basis on which the judges would measure the victim's credibility. In this case, it can be inferred that the descriptions supported it, especially the fact that the victim did not have a “previous history of psychological destabilization,” thereby alluding to her rationality, which had been discussed at length in court. Therefore, we might ask whether any of the opposite possibilities would have served as a basis for a delegitimizing portrayal, that is, whether the victim would have been evaluated as less credible—and therefore, the assault seen with greater doubt—if she had had some kind of mental illness or if her usual sexual practices were of another kind.

We can here observe a categorization of women linked to a traditional idea of honesty, a term that was present in the previous Spanish Criminal Code (1973) up until 1995. It was employed in the context of “crimes against honor” in article 436, where rape was defined as “carnal access” with a woman “of proven honesty.” This conceptualization of honesty included assumptions about respectable sexual behavior, that is, a woman who would not transgress social norms and protect her intimacy as well as that of her family. This stereotype included the myth that rape is easily avoidable (Brandariz Portela, 2021, p. 579) if there is a real will.

Still there is this idea hanging around in the narratives of jurisprudence, [which says that] the woman is passive. [That] she does not have sexual will, and the only thing she has to do is to defend herself from the man. (…) It is very difficult for the vast majority of men to consider that, if a woman does not react or scream, she doesn’t really want to; because in their daily experience, even with their partners, they perform sexual acts without the woman’s explicit will. [There is] this mental scheme about sexual relations that involves the woman giving in, the woman adapting: “When she doesn’t want to, she does say it.” (Interview with Adela Asua, former vice president of the Spanish Constitutional Court)

This distinction had historically led to a legal double standard by which to measure violations against women categorized as honest and all others, so that sexually assaulting laborers, housemaids, or sex workers was rarely considered rape, but rather abuse, excesses that occurred in a power relationship that was otherwise accepted and normalized. The terminology was later (1999) substituted by that of “crimes against sexual freedom.” However, the social memory of previous interpretative patterns resonated very strongly when, on April 26, 2018, the Regional Court of Navarre issued its verdict, condemning the five San Fermin rapists to 9 years in prison for abuse with prevailing, i.e., within a relationship of clear superiority.

The Question of Consent and the New Law

The designation opened a conceptual and linguistic battle that permeated a great variety of social fields. Many citizens engaged with concrete legal terminologies, realizing, often for the first time, that their Criminal Code contained a differentiation between two kinds of rape: abuse and aggression. The fundamental difference between both lay not so much in the physical forms of the assault but on the question as to whether violence or intimidation had mediated. Several scholars (Bocanegra Márquez, 2021; Boldova Pasamar, 2019) have later argued that these are diffuse concepts in contexts in which power relations are clearly conditioning the attitudes of the subjects involved, since an explicit threat of violence is not necessary in order to transmit a notion of danger to the subordinated position.

Furthermore, the case opened up a social debate on the concept of violence itself, a “discursive conflict that reflected a conflict of interpretations, of differing visions of the world that addressed the same facts” (Molpeceres Arnáiz, 2018, p. 99). These debates took place both physically in the streets as well as online (Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2020; Larrondo et al., 2019). Traditional concepts of rape and consent were newly discussed, shifting the focus toward the freedom of the subject who had been assaulted (Amigot Leache, 2022), and questioning the cultural and therefore patriarchal bias of the judges. This enabled the feminist movement to introduce “new frames of reference” (Camps Calvet & Moreno Beltrán, 2019, p. 20) that focused on the structural character of violence against women.

The battle also reached the judiciary, bringing to light—quite unusually—internal discrepancies. Three female judges published a letter (Dopazo et al., 2018) criticizing the designation of the San Fermin rape as abuse, arguing:

7) We believe that keeping that word (abuse) in the Criminal Code to refer to nonconsensual sexual relations, parts from the idea that women continue to be objects to serve the pleasure of men, and that only if men exceed in that use, are they punished, but only if they exceed. That idea that is perceived behind the word abuse is very painful for any woman, whether or not she has been an object of abuse.

The authorial voice of this text is at all times collective: the first-person pronoun we and its related verbal structures all refer to a plural subject. It is a subject that, on the one hand, interprets reality in a similar manner, as the lexical choices of the verbs “believe” or “is perceived” indicate. It is also a subject that shares a collective memory: the phrase “that women continue to be” refers to a past reality that is known by the collective body and builds a link to the actual development of events, which the collective voice experiences similarly—i.e., extracts a similar meaning out of it—and associates to a shared feeling, pain. In sum, we can observe how a collective consciousness expresses itself in this discourse, and how the discourse, at the same time, evokes—and therefore constructs—an agentive collective body that responds to the social reality. Interestingly, the mere process of constructing meaning in a similar way becomes the delimitating factor of that group. In other words: one must not actually suffer a sexual assault on their own physical body to be included in that collective identity, because the collective body suffers it through a shared memory of past experiences and meanings.

These debates led to a widespread discussion on consent and its verbal expressions. Public campaigns against sexual violence had long been using the slogan “No means no.” From that moment on, though, this became insufficient, since it continued to assume a hetero-sexist habitus (Bourdieu, 1986) linked to an unequal distribution of gender roles in which desire and initiative continued to be attributed to the male part, and women were expected to consent or not consent passively, without negotiating the conditions of the proposal. Additionally, the San Fermin case has shown that the absence of an explicit opposition does not imply any kind of acceptance. Thus, No means no was not enough: it was necessary to identify the yes in order to be able to speak about consent, that is, the desire, initiative, and free will of women.

This social awareness initiated a legislative change that culminated in 2023 with the introduction of the Organic Law 10/2022, of September 6, on the Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom. It merged the previous notions of abuse and aggression into a single category denominated sexual aggression (p. 124208) and provided a thorough elaboration of the concept of consent (García Álvarez & Caruso Fontán, 2023) that earned it the popular byname the Only “yes” means “yes” law.

Throughout this time, the demands of most feminist associations leading the protests did not focus on the length of the prison sentences, but on the conceptual debate behind the dictum (Camps Calvet & Moreno Beltrán, 2019). This was partly motivated by prior knowledge of feminist critique formulated by authors such as Davis (2003) toward the prison system, which argued that prisons actually reproduce patterns of violence and sexism (Restrepo Rodríguez & Francés Lecumberri, 2016). However, there was a parallel current of thought whose main concern was the number of years the attackers would spend in prison. This could be observed from the beginning of the demonstrations, as expressed by people who were interviewed in audiovisual media outlets as ordinary citizens. These would express opinions such as that the punishment in the wolfpack case was not “exemplary” enough. A punitive discourse could also be identified in the editorial and op-ed pages of many newspapers:

8) [I]t is clear that we must continue insisting. First, condemning the assault that happened on the night on the 7 [of July] and, second, demanding that the facts denounced be clarified and that the culprits pay for it. That really is a good campaign of prevention: that the assaults do not go unpunished, that it does not come cheap to use force and threat to attack the freedom of women, which is the freedom of everyone. (…) It is clear that one cannot lower one’s guard and it is up to all institutions and citizens to maintain involvement one hundred percent; now, because the whole world is watching us and these types of events have a huge media impact that ends up besmearing the promotion of the festivity (…). (Diario de Noticias de Navarra, July 8, 2016 editorial)

The deontic modality of this text interpellates a collective subjectivity, tracing a clear line between an outgroup (they, the attackers/culprits, who did wrong and therefore must pay) and an ingroup (us, who are on the right side and therefore must marginalize them). In fact, a harsh punishment is presented as a solution to the problem, which is mainly linked to the image of the local festival. The metaphor of not lowering one's guard frames the conflict in warlike terms, again drawing on the schema of a war against evil, distancing the responsibility of the violence from the ingroup. Thus, any self-critique of the dominant rules of one's own social order is erased, and a master narrative of the aggressor as an Other is reinforced.

In the case of the San Fermin gang rape, the two arguments that were mostly employed in order to stress the difference toward the aggressors were the fact that they were originally not from Pamplona, but from the south of Spain; and their alleged irrationality or lack of knowledge of social norms. This punitive imaginary became stronger once the perpetrators were declared guilty by the court, substituting the humanizing discourses that had been published before (Perez Soler, 2018). When applied to sexual aggressors, both the monster narrative and the normal guy narrative share a similar trait in this context: they both highlight the self-felt legitimacy of the putative reader. This relationship can be understood through Mulvey’s (1975) theory of the male gaze, which assumes a predominant identification of the audience with male characters in constructed storylines, and explains, from a psychoanalytic approach, the recurrence of two main archetypes about women in popular culture: the passive object and its counterpart, the femme fatale. Although Mulvey developed this idea from her analysis of contemporary cinema, we may well argue that media coverages of the Wolfpack Case also constructed a spectacularized narrative around these two traditional figures, with plot twists and points of tension similar to those present in the fictional narrative, and, especially, by establishing a dialogue with the public at all times. Furthermore, as criminologist Paz Francés argues (interviewed in October 2018), the contemporary, Western concept of justice also operates as a shared contract that reinforces the dominant rules about acceptable and nonacceptable social behavior. That is, what society criminalizes may often tell us much more about what it constructs about itself than about the individuals who are being convicted:

In the end, the Criminal Code and the penal system are a device for controlling morality—the patriarchal morality—and a device of individualization to blame specific individuals, most likely for all the evils of society, forgetting about collective intervention, which is probably what can cause certain crimes not to be committed or no crimes to be committed at all. (Interview with Paz Francés, criminologist)

We may thus argue that both the media and the legal system offer society a mirror in which to observe and evaluate itself. While framing attackers as monsters allows the public to assume some distance from them without questioning dominant social structures, seeing them as normal guys establishes a relationship of identification, which is viable as long as another—externally perceived—possible culprit can be conceived; in this case, the woman.

In fact, the coexistence (and competence) of both these interpretative frameworks within society became clear after the introduction of the new law. Due to the fact that two typologies of crimes had been merged into one, the spectrum of possible punishments had also been modified; and so, several men who had been convicted for either aggression or abuse had their conviction revised, with the result of slight reductions in the length of their prison sentences. This again led to a mediatic and social critique of the law, this time in terms of punitive reframing. The pressure even prompted Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to speak out about the issue, only 4 months after the introduction of the law:

9) We have verified that the law has had some unwanted effects in its application. I say “unwanted effects” and I fall short, because obviously no one, neither the government nor of course the parliamentary groups that approved this law, had the objective of shortening the sentence of any aggressor. (…) For this reason, we are going to do what needs to be done. What is common sense. What is correct. And what is correct is to defend what the law brings, and to correct the problem, so that in the future there will not be a single reduction in sentences. (El País, 2023)

Sánchez's party, the dominant, social democratic PSOE, would end up allying with the conservatives in order to approve a major reform to the law that his formation had originally agreed on with its coalition partner, the left-wing Podemos. The modifications were mainly aimed at raising the spectrum of possible punishments, again by introducing a distinction between aggression with or without “violence, intimidation, or abuse.”

The above-reproduced excerpt is part of a public speech justifying the move. Sánchez constructs in his discourse two kinds of collective subjectivities. On one hand, he speaks in the name of the governing coalition when he refers to a plural first person (“we have verified”) and their shared goal. However, he broadens this ingroup by including his addressee, that is, Spanish society as a whole when he alludes to “common sense,” assuming the existence of a shared vision of “what is correct.” Thus, correctness is equated with the dominant or agreed-upon social norms, which, he interprets, are not in line with the changes the original law would have introduced to some social contracts. In sum, this last gesture by the Spanish government marked a step backward in the development of the social discussion about sexual violence, showing how social discourses are continuously contested and dependent on the power relations among social forces that support them.