In France, since November 2025, the silence or absence of resistance of a victim can no longer be invoked to exonerate their attacker. The law is now clear: without consent, there is rape. Spain opened this path in 2022 with its “Solo sí es sí” law.
At the end of April 2026, the European Parliament invited the European Commission to propose legislation establishing a common definition of rape within the EU, based on the principle of absence of consent. The law thus refocuses the analysis on the behavior of the perpetrator: did he obtain the victim’s agreement?
This historic turning point finally enshrines in law what victims, feminist movements and legal experts have been defending for years: women’s bodies are never acquired, never owed. However, the digital dimension shatters consent, including in the face of the most serious violence.
Intimate images broadcast without agreement
In digital spaces, women’s bodies remain perceived as available, monetizable, exploitable. Among the most serious cases and in continuation of the Pelicot affair, a CNN investigation published in April 2026 revealed the existence of online networks on Telegram messaging, within which thousands of users exchanged content and advice relating to chemical submission and sexual violence.
Thousands of women see their intimate images broadcast without their consent, while artificial intelligence (AI) tools like xAI’s Grok show that it is now possible to sexualize a photo in one prompt (instruction given to a generative AI assistant, Editor’s note), transforming each woman into a potential target.
The European Parliament and the Council reached an agreement on May 7 to ban AI “nudification” systems. A major step forward, still subject to formal adoption by the co-legislators, but which, on its own, cannot be sufficient.
However, online violence is only an extension of that committed offline. The European Digital Services Regulation (DSA) enshrines the principle that what is illegal on the street is also illegal on the screen.
Physical and digital spaces should therefore no longer be thought of as two distinct spheres, but as a single social, legal and political continuum. So, how can we explain that the digital space still resists the evolution of our conceptions of the autonomy of women’s bodies?
When pornography dictates its rules
Pornography, an industry with colossal profits, has imposed its codes since the beginning of the digital age. The report on porn crime from the High Council for Equality is clear: violence and male domination constitute the norm.
The trivialization of pornographic content has thus established as a dogma an implicit presumption of consent under which any representation of a sexual act would be a priori legal, and women’s bodies systematically available.
These contents are today the subject of regulation mainly designed from the sole prism of child protection. Between 2024 and 2025, Arcom targeted more than ten pornographic sites for non-compliance with their age verification obligations, in a context where nearly 2.3 million French minors accessed them each month.
Rape simulations
This approach to regulation can be described as reductive in that it ignores the protection of women and opens the way to other abuses, or even worse, authorizes them: sexist and racist stereotypes, apology for the most serious sexual violence.
Simulations of rape are the most glaring example: authorized in France as long as they are accompanied by a message warning of the illegality of the behavior depicted, they constitute a legal aberration in that they constitute the apology of a crime tolerated by the law.
In this context, the expected opening in 2026 of the French Bukkake trial before the criminal courts highlights massive acts of sexual exploitation in the pornographic industry involving dozens of victims, the sexist and racist dimension now recognized by the highest court, and reminds us that behind the trivialization of content lies real and organized violence.
If the law now recognizes that silence does not constitute consent, how can we justify that sexual images of women can be distributed online without explicit proof of their consent? Should we not, therefore, systematically require free, informed consent prior to any publication?
Breaking the digital omerta
It is about emerging from a form of collective blindness to rethink the regulation of pornography, which shapes representations of desire, consent and relationships between genders.
Let us refuse to allow women’s bodies to be considered available in digital spaces and, by extension, in our imaginations.
Let us not look away from the content that our societies are designed to combat: sexism, racism and the apology of the most serious sexual violence, hidden under the label of fantasies and which make digital technology one of the best-kept bastions of patterns of domination.
Finally, let’s enforce the law. The European Union requires Member States, by 2027, to put in place effective systems allowing the rapid removal of sexual content broadcast without consent.
Like many other countries, France is not up to the challenge and still fails to offer a truly protective framework for victims. Faced with this failure, the European Court of Human Rights sent a request to France in March 2026, inviting the government to detail the existing mechanisms to facilitate the deletion of such content.
Systemic violence calls for structural responses, including in the digital space. Our governments can no longer be satisfied with fragmented responses. It is now up to them to make the protection of women’s rights a real priority, by immediately mobilizing, alongside civil society, legal and technical solutions capable of responding to the scale of violence.
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