Women wearing jeans cannot be raped

In Italy women wearing jeans cannot be raped...

Italy's highest court has ruled that a woman wearing jeans cannot be raped. The Supreme Court of Appeal in Rome on Wednesday overturned a rape conviction, saying that the supposed victim must have agreed to sx because her jeans could not have been removed without her consent.

A court in the southern town of Potenza had convicted a driving instructor of raping his 18-year-old pupil. The instructor, aged 45 and identified only as Carmine, had been sentenced to 34 months' jail.

His defence had argued that the young woman - identified as Rosa - had consented to sx, a version of events which the woman strongly denied. The Supreme Court ruled that it was impossible to remove a pair of jeans "without the collaboration of the person wearing them", and that the young woman must therefore have consented to sx.

In a judgement likely to anger women's rights organisations, the rape conviction was reversed. Driving instructors in Italy have a reputation, deserved or undeserved, for molesting young female pupils, and the case appeared at first to be a familiar story of sxual assault on a lonely country road.

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