Blanca's "first time" was a violation, which took years to be accepted. He was 17 years old and linked with a partner at the end of the year party. He liked a boy and thought he was willing to have sex with him. But at one point, he didn't like his attitude and asked him to stop. He, instead of refusing, squeezed himself against the wall, covered his mouth and forced him. He breathed deeply and tried to reassure him not to hurt him. He told his friends, unimportant: that he had drunk two beers and that he had left him.

Nine years later, after two relationships of couple full of humiliations and abuses, reinforced by therapy and the bond with feminism, Blanca recognized that he had raped that boy and cried for the first time.

Less than 15 per cent of the complaints collected by the Adavas association are assaults by unknown persons: the aggressor takes advantage of his closeness to the victim and no one believes it.

When we hear “rape”, we imagine a very different event: a young man walks at night, a stranger throws himself over him and brutally forces him. According to psychologist Norma Vázquez, “doing it in boys” is one of the contexts in which more sexual assaults occur. However, women find it difficult to recognize it, as their desire was that there be some kind of relationship or sexual intercourse.

Threshold for admission

What happened to Blanca is one of the most common examples: a woman meets a man and wants to be with him, suddenly he is not happy or does not find it appropriate what the direction he has taken and the man presses or forces him to follow.

According to Norma Vázquez, the border is “coercion: if it has been pressured, if man has not accepted the woman’s refusal”. But Vázquez recognizes that, often, when the aggressor is known, the line between the consensual and the forced relationship is very diffuse. “There are women who start saying no, but who give up so that they don’t get pressure, blackmail or worse, for example, suffer physical violence. Many times these women do not consider it a violation, because they believe that after all they accepted it or played it.”

The psychologist complains that society does not understand why women do not fiercely reject the relationship they do not want. He doesn't like people asking that question, and he doesn't like to reflect on why many men still don't accept the first refusal. “Saying no, maintaining and defending is nothing easy,” he said.

Vázquez stressed that in an investigation, involving about 70 women, no one reported sexual assaults: “They told us things like this. ‘I wouldn’t be comfortable explaining to the prosecutor, to the judge, to the doctor… that I just wanted to rub, or that he had become angry and frightened, or that I didn’t know how to say on time.’ It is a question of biting the tail: attacks that meet the stereotype of violent aggression are being denounced.