14 NEWS Best columns: Europe
ROMANIA
The accidental drowning of a 6-week-old baby
during baptism is sparking a call for religious
reform, said Mihai Copaceanu. Traditionalists in
the Romanian Orthodox clergy insist that baptism
requires that the naked child be fully immersed in
water three times. At one such christening recently,
in the city of Suceava, the baby was unresponsive,
his lips blue, when he was lifted the third time. He
died in the hospital the next day, the parents’ joy at
welcoming their child into the faith turned to grief.
But the only real surprise is that such tragedies
don’t happen more often. Some priests approach
the ceremony “like firefighters, splashing waterwith incredible force.” They lack all empathy for
an infant’s fragility and fear. Wouldn’t we be out-
raged if we saw a video of “a remote tribe throw-
ing newborn babies into the water”? But this is
happening in the middle of Europe! Tens of thou-
sands of people have now signed a petition calling
for the end of full immersion. We know baptisms
can be performed gently: When Archbishop Calinic
baptized the daughter of Prince Nicolae, for ex-
ample, he simply dribbled water on her forehead
three times. We must hope that more enlightened
members of the church hierarchy win out over the
hard-liners and ban this “barbarity” for good.Student demonstrations that began last month have
escalated into Turkey’s most widespread unrest in
nearly a decade , said Andrew Wilks. They started
when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appointed
an operative from his Islamist party— rather than
a professor, as is traditional—to be rector of Istan-
bul’s liberal Bogazici University. And the protests
escalated in early February after two students were
charged with inciting hatred over an art exhibition
that included a poster of Islam’s holiest site, the
Kaaba in Mecca, festooned with LGBT flags. The
students’ arrest was seen as an attack on academic
freedom and protests spread through Istanbul and
to other cities. Erdogan responded brutally, send-ing troops to campus and arresting hundreds. His
government is demonizing the protesters, “labeling
them terrorists and employing homophobic slurs.”
But the people are against him: Polls show that
nearly 70 percent believe the rector of Bogazici
should be a faculty member, and every night, Istan-
bul residents bang pots and pans in support of
the students. The crackdown is also undermining
Erdogan’s “efforts to build bridges” with the Biden
administration after four years of coziness with
Pres i dent Trump. The U.S. State Depart ment has
condemned the homophobic rhetoric and expressed
concern at the arrests. If Erdogan doesn’t remove
the rector, this “headache” will only intensify.Ge
ttyChild-protection activists have for de-
cades demanded that France institute
an official age of consent, said Solène
Cordier in Le Monde. Now the National
Assembly is at long last drawing up a law
that will classify sexual relations with a
child under age 15 as statutory rape. It’s
already illegal for an adult to have sex
with a minor, but the perpetrator can
only be charged with rape if prosecutors
can prove the use of “violence, coercion,
threat, or surprise.” That loophole has
complicated attempts to prosecute alleged
predators, who can defend themselves
by claiming the sex was consensual. The
campaign to change the law has reached critical mass in recent
months thanks to best- selling memoirs from high- profile child-
abuse victims and their family members. In Consent, publisher
Vanessa Springora revealed how she was groomed for sex from
age 14 by writer Gabriel Matzneff, then 50; in The Big Family,
attorney Camille Kouchner detailed the alleged rape of her twin
brother by their stepfather, public intellectual Olivier Duhamel.
The books sparked an online movement in which tens of thou-
sands of people shared similar stories on social media.For incestuous relationships, the age of consent will be set at 18,
said Alexandra Saviana in Marianne. France abolished the crime
of incest after the French Revolution, regarding it as a moralistic
relic of the Catholic Church. Today, while “you can’t marry
your father or sister,” close blood relatives can have consensual
sexual relationships. But the “explosion of the Duhamel affair”
has changed French thinking on incest and the power that anolder family member can wield over a
young relation.It took a series of monstrous crimes to
get France to this point, said Chris Jew-
ers in the Daily Mail (U.K.). In 2017, a
28-year-old man who sexually assaulted
an 11-year-old girl was charged only
with sexual abuse of a minor, not rape,
because prosecutors had no evidence
of coercion. France’s top court is cur-
rently hearing the case of a 25-year-old
woman, known only as “Julie,” who
says she was groomed at age 13 by a
Parisian firefighter named Pierre and
then repeatedly raped by him and his colleagues. A lower court
classified the crime as sexual assault—again, not rape— implying
there was consent because Julie had been dating one of the men.Some activists believe the draft law isn’t tough enough, said
Marie Campistron in Le Parisien. Lawmakers are considering
a “Romeo and Juliet clause,” an exception for teenage lovers
whose age gap is five years or less. “The 17-and-a-half-year-old
young man who has a relationship with a 14-and-a-half-year-old
girl must not become a criminal when he turns 18,” said Justice
Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti. But activists argue that young
adults often prey on young teens, and that the proposed excep-
tion will effectively lower the age of consent to 13. Still, having
an age of consent at all is a huge step for France. “Until now, the
idea that a 6-year-old could consent to a sexual act was validated
by the Criminal Code,” says lawyer and activist Pascal Cussigh.
Soon, that “absurdity” will be no more.A Christian
ritual that
tortures babies
Mihai Copaceanu
Adevarul
TURKEY
Demanding justice for ‘Julie’ in ParisShowdown
over academic
freedom
Andrew Wilks
AlJazeera.com (Qatar)
France: Finally, an age of consent