Kissing a person’s hand without their consent constitutes sexual assault and not simple street harassment, ruled the Spanish Supreme Court in a decision consulted Monday by AFP. The decision of Spain’s highest court upheld the conviction of a man for sexual assault after non-consensual touching of a woman at a bus stop.
The accused’s defense wanted to reclassify the facts as simple “street harassment”, but the magistrates considered that any physical contact with a sexual connotation went beyond this category and that he would have to pay the fine of 1,620 euros provided for in his first conviction.
For them, it was not a “simple gesture consisting of taking her hand (…) The applicant acted with the intention of violating her sexual integrity: he took her hand while kissing it, while asking her through gestures to accompany him by offering him money, and this on two occasions”.
A precedent that marked Spain
“There was therefore an act of sexual assault to the extent that the action describes a contact of a sexual nature and tone that the victim had no obligation to endure, with a clearly sexual content and an attack on the victim by reducing her to an object,” the judgment continues.
The Court considers that taking a woman’s hand and kissing her without her consent, in a context where the perpetrator expresses a sexual intention (such as offering money to accompany her), is an imposition of the perpetrator’s will on the sexual freedom of the victim. Spain, at the forefront in the fight against gender-based violence, passed a pioneering law in Europe against violence against women in 2004.
In 2025, the so-called “forced kiss” affair saw the former strongman of national football, the president of the Spanish Football Federation Luis Rubiales, convicted of sexual assault for a kiss imposed on the player Jenni Hermoso during Spain’s victory in the final of the Women’s World Cup in Sydney in August 2023. The scandal of this surprise kiss on the mouth of the attacker had a worldwide repercussion, and Luis Rubiales, forced to resignation, was fined 10,800 euros.
