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Washington (AFP)
Stealthing, a recent term, refers to the unintentional removal of a condom. In America, the fight against this long taboo practice is intensifying, marked by a major victory in early October in California, which became the first American state to ban it.
Brooke, 28 at the time and a student in Tennessee, feels “like (she) has been raped,” but finds conflicting information on the internet, “until she finally learns that it can be considered a form of ‘aggression”.
This experience leaves consequences: it will take time for her not to be “very stressed during sex, always checking that the condom is still there”.
But “being able to see it as an assault helps you to digest it, to accept it, and to understand that the victim is not at fault,” she told AFP.
Elected officials are campaigning for stealthing to be clearly prohibited by law, which would allow victims to file a complaint. Among them, Cristina Garcia, elected at the origin of the Californian law, says to have been inspired by her personal experience.
“Men have tried, and I caught them in the act as they tried to take off their condoms,” she said, considering she was “lucky” to be able to stop them.
Realizing the “magnitude” of the phenomenon and discovering the existence of “online communities” listing advice on how to cheat on her sexual partner, convince her of the importance of this law, which she is trying to pass for the first time in 2017.
This new text provides for the possibility of damages for the victims, possibly increased by a dissuasive financial penalty decided by the judge, without mentioning a prison sentence.
“Trauma”
If Cristina Garcia finally succeeded in her bet, other elected officials tried to impose similar texts, without success.
For Melissa Agard, a Democrat of Wisconsin who proposed a law there in 2017, the fact that those who hold the legislative power are often men makes them more likely to “brush this problem aside”.
Moreover, “I think it’s difficult for them to hear these conversations, it makes them uncomfortable,” she told AFP.
Cristina Garcia highlights the role of the British series “I May Destroy You”, released in 2020, which helped audiences “understand and believe the trauma” caused by this act and made it “more mainstream”.
The main character, Arabella (Michaela Coel), is the victim of stealthing, one of the rare representations of this act in popular culture.
Women, but also gay men, are concerned. Still, the extent of the phenomenon is difficult to determine, because little research has been conducted on the issue. In a study published in 2019 in the United States, 12% of women surveyed (aged 21 to 30) claimed to have been victims of stealthing.
For Carolyn Maloney, elected to the House of Representatives who defends the idea of a national law, federal action must begin with “research of facts and data” in order to inform parliamentarians “on the dangers and the prevalence “stealthing.
Sherry Colb, professor of law at Cornell University, believes that stealthing may already meet the definition of sexual assault in some American states – those in which “force” does not have to have been used – because the person has consented to “something different from what is happening”.
“It’s as if someone agrees to receive a vaccine with a sterile syringe, and at the last moment, the doctor substitutes a dirty syringe”, she compares.
The professor welcomes the existence of laws punishing this act, but is not certain of their effectiveness, in particular because the respondent could say “that the condom slipped, or that she agreed”.
Sherry Colb also fears that a jury, because of “a very sexist thought pattern”, gives less credit to the victim’s words, because she initially consented to the sexual act.
* the first name has been changed
© 2021 AFP
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