Sexual assault
Sexual assault is a criminal offence and defined under section 3 of the Sexual
Offences Act 2003. The offence can be committed by a man or a woman and requires
touching without consent where the touching is sexual. For example, the unwanted
touching of a woman’s breasts or a person’s genital area or buttocks, or unwanted
kissing would be a sexual assault. The touching can be through clothing or anything
else (such as a bedsheet) and includes touching done with any part of the body or
anything else. The term sexual assault is sometimes wrongly used as a generic term to
include or indicate other sexual offences. The maximum sentence for sexual assault is
10 years’ imprisonment.
This report uses both ‘sexual violence’ and ‘sexual harassment’. However, there is
crossover between these two terms. This is covered in more detail below.
Sexual violence
A non-legal term used as an umbrella term to refer to and include the different sexual
offences.
Sexual harassment
Under section 26 (2) of the Equality Act 2010, harassment is defined as unwanted
conduct of a sexual nature which has the purpose or effect of violating the recipient’s
dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive
environment. It is a prohibited conduct under the Equality Act 2010, for which
redress lies in the civil courts.
There is no specific criminal offence of sexual harassment in English law. However,
behaviour referred to as ‘sexual harassment’ can be criminal under various pieces of
legislation, depending on the nature and severity of the incident. The types of
behaviours or conduct which make up sexual harassment are varied and may include:
verbal harassment such as whistling, catcalling, sexual comments, sexual innuendo,
telling sexual jokes and stories, spreading rumour about a person’s sex life; nonverbal harassment such as looking someone up and down, displaying pictures of a
sexual nature, sending emails containing sexual content, making sexual gestures, and
asking for sexual favours. Sexual harassment will overlap with the criminal law on
sexual offences once any touching of the other person is involved for example,
physical unwanted sexual advances, kissing, touching, hugging, stroking, patting of
someone’s clothes, body, hair, and rubbing up against someone, where the touching
is sexual. Thus patting someone on the bottom may constitute both a sexual assault
and sexual harassment and could be pursued in the criminal courts as a sexual
assault. Some forms of sexual harassment may overlap with other criminal offences
such as harassment and stalking, and revenge porn.
Harassment and stalking
Whilst there is no criminal offence of sexual harassment, the criminal law sets out
offences regarding harassment and stalking under the Protection from Harassment
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