Europe: Brussels police officials are looking for a suspect who brutally beat, kicked and raped a woman on Sunday, May 22, at 09:05 am, on a walking path in Park L28, near Rue Tielemans in Laeken.
The suspect is of average size and has dark hair that is long on the top as well as shaved on the sides and at the back. At the time of the event, he wore a white shirt, grey shorts and black sneakers with white soles.
Moreover, two-thirds of people from Belgium (aged 16 to 69) experienced some kind of sexual violence during their lifetime, as per the studies conducted by the universities of Ghent as well as Liège in cooperation with the National Institute of Criminalistics & Criminology in 2021.
More than 5,000 individuals participated in the survey, as well as some 16 percent of female respondents reported being raped.
In spite of these statistics, Belgium is ahead of most of the European Union nations in its laws on sexual assault, as it reformed its sexual criminal laws to stress the consent of both partners in 2019, taking a cue from the United Kingdom’s criminal law which recently broadened its definition of rape.
Along with this, the majority of European nations first consider an incident as rape if coercion or a struggle was involved. Human rights activists denounce this approach because of the freeze reaction that most of the victims faced.
