Defining and Registering Criminal Offences and Measures - Oapen

70
Rape and Other Sexual Offences
Sexual abuse of minor: sexual intercourse, or any other form of physical sexual contact,
with a person below the age of consent
Please indicate the age of consent 34 in your country: ____________________________
Indicate whether included or
Include the following:
sexual intercourse or any other form of physical sexual
contact committed without violence
acts committed by a person below the age of consent
acts committed by persons above the age of consent
attempts
Exclude the following:
verbal or any other form of non-physical molestation
child pornography
acts considered as rape (see above)
excluded:
in police
statistics
in conviction
statistics
incl. excl. incl. excl.
For the fourth edition of the ESB questionnaire, 32 countries completed the part
of the questionnaire dealing with offence definitions. Detailed data are provided
for, respectively, rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse of minors.
4.1 Offence definition for rape (tables D.7.1 and D.7.2)
Half of the countries could meet the ESB standard definition of rape at the police
level. For the other countries, some items could not be included/excluded from
the data. However, overall, there are no more than seven deviations per item to
include/exclude. Some countries (Austria, Greece, The Netherlands, Slovakia, Switzerland,
England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland) could not include sexual intercourse
with a helpless person in their rape data, whereas three countries (Albania,
Italy and Poland) could not exclude sexual assault from data.
Most countries could meet the ESB standard definition of rape at the conviction
level; there are fewer deviations for standard definitions for conviction statistics
than for police statistics. Sexual assault is included in data from 4 countries
(Italy, Poland, Switzerland, and Turkey).
34 Age of consent means the age under which a minor cannot validly consent to have sexual contacts.