When Julian Assange, the founder of
WikiLeaks, asked two Swedish women out on dates in August, he may not have known that Swedish laws protecting women in their sexual encounters include wide-ranging definitions of sexual assault and rape.
Now Mr. Assange, an Australian who is currently in Britain, faces an extradition request from Swedish prosecutors who want to question him on whether separate sexual encounters he had with each of the women became nonconsensual after he was no longer using a condom. Mr. Assange has denied all wrongdoing.
“If he claims that truth and transparency is behind WikiLeaks, he needs to accept the same standards of transparency for himself and come testify,” said Claes Borgstrom, a lawyer representing the two women.
Swedish criminal laws regarding sex offenses are not necessarily all that much stricter than the laws in many other European countries, Mr. Borgstrom said.
But Swedish women, backed by a strong consciousness of women’s rights and a history of a very public discussion of the scourge of sexual violence, may be more willing than most to look to the law for help.
The number of reported rapes in Sweden is by far the highest in the
European Union, according to the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics, which cites 53 offenses per 100,000 inhabitants. Britain has the next highest rate, at 24 per 100,000.
Stefan Lisinski, a veteran crime reporter for the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, said he spent between a third to half of his time writing about sexual crimes. Last month a senior police chief was convicted of rape in a high-profile appeals case.
This is most probably not a result of more sexual violence taking place in Sweden, legal experts said, but a result of more crimes being reported.
Some people say, in fact, that if female empowerment — economic, social, and also legal — has a different quality in Sweden than in other countries, it is because men are also at the heart of the gender-equality debate.
Eighty-five percent of Swedish men take parental leave and even conservative male politicians call themselves feminists. With men and women more equal at work and at home, and concerns about the state intruding actively into family and personal affairs long gone, some taboos that may have protected sexual offenders may also be disappearing.
Some people are now lobbying for an additional tightening of the sexual assault and rape laws in Sweden. They contend that the definition of rape should be expanded to include situations in which a woman does not explicitly say no to sex, but clearly signals her opposition in other ways.
“Sometimes we lawyers joke that soon you have to have a written permission before you can have sex,” said Bengt Hesselberg, a defense lawyer with extensive experience in sexual cases. If Sweden’s current criminal code is not much stricter on sexual offenses than those of other European countries, the Swedish laws may be more nuanced, by differentiating among three categories of rape and, unusually, invoking the concept of “unlawful coercion.”
There is a category identified as “severe rape,” which involves a high degree of violence and which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for the perpetrator; another known as “regular rape,” which may involve some violence and calls for a maximum sentence of six years; and a third called “less severe rape,” which may not involve violence but still includes the imposition of sexual intercourse on a person against her will.
The prosecutors seeking Mr. Assange’s extradition suspect that he may have engaged in this last category, which is punishable by as much as four years in prison.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 8, 2010
An earlier version of this article mispelled the name of the lawyer Claes Borgstrom.
