The court report emphasized that the vulnerability and harm suffered by the victim were due not only to the main crime, but also to other aggravating acts and with full criminal autonomy, which led to a review of the scope of the punishment. As Europa Press detailed, Spain’s Supreme Court reviewed the case of a young man initially convicted only of sexually assaulting a minor and ultimately imposed a prison sentence of five years and four months, supplemented by separate sentences for exhibitionism and the recruitment of minors for the production of pornographic material.
According to Europa Press, the Criminal Court’s decision responded to an appeal by the public prosecutor’s office, which rejected the initial limitation of the sentence to the crime of sexual assault and a fine for bodily harm. The Supreme Court maintained the previous sentence, which amounted to two and a half years for sexual assault, but added further sentences: four months and fifteen days for a continuous crime of exhibitionism and another two and a half years for recruiting and using the minor for the production of pornographic material.
According to the facts verified and collected by Europa Press, the defendant and the minor, both students of the same school in the Balearic Islands, began contact through social networks when he was 18 and she was 13 years old. Over time, he began sending her nude photos and insistently requested that she send him similar photos. The pressure escalated to direct threats: when the minor refused, the young man warned that he could harm her or her family, included in his messages images of a knife and explicit statements that “he would kill her” if she did not comply with his requests.
The minor gave in and sent photos, although the defendant persisted in his behavior and continued to demand more material, threatening to distribute the images already received if she refused. Europa Press reported that the violence was not limited to the digital realm. The court verdict states that the young man once grabbed the victim by the waist and tried to kiss her without her consent. Later, the judgment states, the minor walked alone on the street, the defendant followed her and physically attacked her after she refused to engage in sexual relations.
The victim’s suffering led to the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress syndrome, according to the verdict represented by the prosecution and reported by Europa Press. The judges noted that the minor suffered from recurrent anxiety and nervousness, experienced a significant deterioration in school performance and a change in eating habits, and required extensive psychological interventions to cope with the consequences.
The Supreme Court emphasized the need to consider these behaviors as separate crimes. The newspaper Europa Press reported that the judges ruled that neither the crime of exhibitionism nor the crime of recruiting child pornography was included in the crime of sexual assault. Both criminal episodes occurred at different times and had their own impact on the integrity of the minor, different from those protected by the sexual assault classification.
The ruling emphasized that obtaining pornographic material and distributing obscene images cannot be considered part of the main offense. In this context, as confirmed by Europa Press, the Supreme Court stated that “the sending of obscene images by the defendant and the obtaining of pornographic content by the minor through coercion developed autonomously, were separate in time and constituted a different violation of the legal interest protected by the crime of sexual assault.”
The ruling also accused the lower court of “error in misapplying the principle of consumption and failing to respond criminally” to criminal activities, which, in the Supreme Court’s view, constituted independent episodes in both plot and time. The judges’ arguments, quoted by Europa Press, claim that the facts of the case “in no case do the attempts at sexual acts and the display of pornographic material, as well as the sending of photos and videos by them to the defendant, be grouped together as a single unit of action.”
Europa Press also emphasizes that for the judges there was no objective connection between the sexual assaults and the corruption of minors, so the criminal response had to be autonomous for each of the crimes reviewed. The classification and individualization of the sentences become key elements of the judgment, since their sum led to the extension of the sentence imposed by the Supreme Court against the young man accused in this case in the Balearic Islands.
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