According to a news report aired by the commercial television network Nelonen on Sunday, courts in Finland have been handing out relatively lenient sentences in cases of sexual assault - even in some which have led to physical injury.
Nelonen examined all sex crime cases handled by Finnish district courts over the past year and found out that prosecutors and courts have considered acts involving injury to the victim, or in which the woman’s home has been violently broken into, and even in which the victim has been kept a prisoner for several days, to meet the definition of “coercive sexual contact”, a category of sexual assault considered less serious than actual rape.
The new category was introduced to Finnish law in 1999. Opponents of the new definition predicted at the time that the change would lead to more lenient sentences in sex crimes.
The Nelonen report found that more than half of those convicted of actual rape have to serve real prison time. Less than one in ten of those convicted of the lesser crime have had to serve custodial sentences.
The original purpose of the introduction of “coercive sexual contact” as a lesser category of sexual assault was to encourage the prosecution of cases in which one partner was not a fully willing participant of sexual contact, but which are not seen to qualify as full-blown rape.
The Nelonen report suggests that the change has had an opposite effect - that of letting real rapists off with lenient sentences.
