The European Parliament is finally moving on one of the most important legal reforms in the area of sexual violence: a common European definition of rape that puts consent at the centre rather than whether someone fought back with enough force and resistance.
The direction is right, and the political momentum behind it is real. The question is whether the final text will be strong enough to actually do what it promises.
Several legal terms that are essential to making consent law work in practice did not survive the committee negotiations. “Explicit consent” as a qualifier is missing. Gone is the “fawn response,” the freeze reaction that explains why so many victims go still rather than fight back, and which, without a name in the legal framework, will keep being read as agreement.
Gone too is any reference to “rape culture,” removed at the request of some political groups, at precisely the moment when the world is being confronted with what rape culture actually looks like in practice.
These terms were not removed because they were wrong, but because there are forces in the European Parliament who do not want these words in European law. The upcoming plenary vote is the first opportunity to restore them.
The reason language matters is that law does not just prohibit things, it also tells people what to look for. A police officer taking a statement, a prosecutor deciding whether to press charges, a jury trying to make sense of conflicting accounts, all of them are making judgment calls shaped by the framework the law provides.
Without “explicit consent” in the text, the standard remains ambiguous at exactly the moment it needs to be clear. Without “rape culture,” the law has no way of asserting that the problem runs deeper than individual bad actors. Without the “fawn response,” the officer in the room is left with their instincts about how a real victim behaves, and those instincts have not served victims well.
A recent investigation exposed global online networks where men gather to share detailed instructions on how to drug their partners and assault them while they sleep. They call it a “community”. They encourage each other, share techniques, discuss dosages, and advise on how to avoid detection.
One user described running a business selling odourless sleeping liquid, delivering it worldwide for 150 euros a bottle, marketed explicitly to men who want to drug and rape their partners without detection. Another livestreamed the assault of his unconscious wife to paying viewers who directed him in real time.
These networks reach tens of millions of people every month. As a French lawmaker who was herself drugged by a senator put it, these spaces function as 'online rape academies, where every subject is taught.' Removing 'rape culture' from a legal text does not make that culture go away, it simply leaves the law without the language to name and challenge it.
The EU tried to address consent-based rape law in a broader directive on violence against women, and those negotiations collapsed in 2024, partly because some Member States argued the EU had no business legislating on rape at all.
Parliament is now trying again on firmer legal ground, and what it has produced is a serious starting point. But a starting point is only as good as what follows it. The Commission now has to draft actual legislation, and that legislation needs to be more precise than the political compromise that preceded it.
It needs to define consent clearly, explain what its absence can look like when someone is too frightened or coerced to say no out loud, and establish that training for everyone who works with victims is not optional.
A consent law that goes to plenary still leaving “explicit consent” on the cutting room floor is not a finished reform. Words left out of law do not disappear. They get replaced by the assumption that silence means yes, and that a woman who did not fight back must have agreed. Getting those words right is the whole point.
