“Yo sí te Creo”: Alcohol-facilitated sexual violence among young women in the Spanish night-time economy
| Author | Nuria Romo-Avilés,Laura Pavón-Benítez,Pilar Tarancón Gómez |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639211057288 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
“Yo sí te Creo”:Alcohol-
facilitated sexual violence
among young women
in the Spanish night-time
economy
Pilar Tarancón Gómez
Department of Public and Company Law, Faculty of
Law, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete,
Spain
Nuria Romo-Avilés ,
and Laura Pavón-Benítez
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology,
Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of
Granada, Granada, Spain
Abstract
This study investigates the factors associated with alcohol-facilitated sexual violence
among young women in the Spanish night-time economy, through the analysis of
twenty-six qualitative interviews with eleven young women and fifteen young men who
frequent these spaces. Our results show how this type of violence originates, both
from the perspective of the young women and the young men. The young women
warn of the risk of sexual victimization associated with the abuse of alcohol. The young
men, for their part, describe the tactics used to gain non-consensual sexual contact.
These data contribute to showing how important it is for the legislation on these matters
to have a gender perspective. They also add to the complex debate on the penal reform
that is ongoing in Spain, in particular on sexual crimes facilitated by alcohol abuse.
Corresponding author:
Pilar Tarancón Gómez, Department of Public and Company Law, Faculty of Law, University of Castilla-La
Mancha, Plaza de la Universidad, 1, 02071 Albacete (Spain).
Email: Pilar.Tarancon@uclm.es
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2022, Vol. 31(4) 580–602
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09646639211057288
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
Keywords
Night-time economy, alcohol-facilitated sexual violence, chemical vulnerability,
perpetration, gender
Introduction
Spain is currently immersed in a profound criminal and social debate about the reform of
sexual crime legislation. This article aims to contribute to the discussion of its central
issues, focusing on the data found in a qualitative study that explores the narratives
that young people maintain on the sexual violence that occurs in the Spanish night-time
economy. To do so, the reader needs to be aware of the context both of the circumstances
that have fomented this reform and the changes in criminal law that will be brought about
if the reform succeeds.
There are essentially three circumstances that should be noted. The first concerns the
data and figures relating to sexual crimes against women. Just as in the global panorama,
the accumulated evidence shows that sexual violence against women, which we under-
stand in a broad definition as acts that range from many types of unwelcome verbal
and physical sexual attention –sexual harassment –to non-consensual sexual contact
or intercourse (World Health Organization, 2011), constitutes a serious problem in
Spanish society.
1
The second is the ratification of what is known as the Istanbul
Convention in 2014, which urges states to strengthen the protection of women against
all forms of violence, including sexual violence, which disproportionately affects
women.
2
Lastly, the third is the social and legal debate prompted by certain cases of
sexual violence known as “manadas”
3
that have taken place in the environment of the
night-time economy. Specifically, the term manada has its origin in the events relating
to the case of the rape of an eighteen-year-old woman, during the San Fermín festival
in Pamplona in 2016, by a group of five young men who referred to themselves by
this name on their social networks. This occurrence generated a great deal of controversy,
both due to the circumstances in which the events took place and the fact that the victim’s
testimony/credibility was put into question until, finally, the Supreme Court, the highest
judicial body in Spain, judged the events as a continuous crime of rape.
4
The social and
media attention the case received caused the fight against la manada to be transformed
into a symbolic struggle –a struggle that has taken place on the streets and on social net-
works to the shouts of “silence does not mean yes”,“only yes means yes”, and “Ido
believe you”(“yo sí te creo”).
The draft of the new Organic Law for the Guarantee of Sexual Freedom
5
, passed in
2020, which is still currently being processed and debated, brings together these legal
and social demands. This is a “ley integral”,a“comprehensive law”that also addresses
aspects relating to the prevention of these offences and care for victims through a gender
perspective, adding the structural factors that are behind the violence that women suffer
outside an intimate relationship to the debate
6
. When compared with the current criminal
legislation
7
, the draft bill represents a substantial modification that takes aim at the ideo-
logical underpinning of the patriarchy that still lives on in this law (Faraldo et al., 2019).
The legislation currently in force does not include that perspective, but is gender-neutral;
Tarancón et al. 581
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