There’s been an uproar in Italy after a Judge acquitted a school caretaker of sexually assaulting a pupil because it “lasted less than ten seconds”.
The teen was walking up a staircase at a school in Rome with a friend at the time of the incident. 66-year-old Antonio Avola had put his hand down the trousers of a 17-year-old girl before touching her buttocks and pulling on her underwear.
Avola told her: “Love, you know I was joking.” The youngster reported the caretaker to police in April 2022. He admitted to touching the girl without her consent, but insisted it was a “joke”.
Avola went on trial on charges of sexual assault, with prosecutors seeking a three-year jail term if he was convicted. The judge however ruled that the grope lasted “between five and 10 seconds” and was therefore too fleeting to be considered a crime.
The ruling said that while the teenager’s account was credible, the “modalities” of the gesture left “margins of doubt” on the “voluntary nature of the violation of the girl’s sexual freedom considering the very nature of touching the buttocks, for a certainly minimal time, given that the whole action is concentrated in a handful of seconds.”
The judge added;
“Furthermore, it seems likely that the brushing of the buttocks was caused by an awkward manoeuvre of the defendant which, due to the dynamics of the action, was carried out while the subject was in motion.”
Following the court judgement, Italians expressed their outrage on social media by posting videos of themselves touching intimate body parts alongside the hashtags “palpata breve” (brief grope) and “10 secondi” (10 seconds).
The trend was started by the White Lotus actor Paolo Camilli and picked up by Italy’s most prominent influencer, Chiara Ferragni. Another influencer, Francesco Cicconetti, wrote on TikTok: “Who decides that 10 seconds is not a long time? Who times the seconds while you’re being harassed?”
Italian judges have been criticised in the past for similar rulings. In 2017, a judge in Ancona cleared two men of rape partly because he said the victim looked too masculine to be a target of attraction.