Austria’s justice minister has presented plans for a major tightening of the country’s sexual offences law.
As Anna Sporrer (Social Democratic Party of Austria, SPÖ) told newspaper Die Presse on July 11 the idea was to base the law on the principle of “only yes means yes” and look towards Nordic countries for guidance.
“With sexual intercourse, the woman should have expressly given her consent and the man should not be able to point out ‘that she didn’t say anything and wanted it anyway’,” the former judge said.
“It is about situations where a victim goes into a state of shock due to the surprising attack and can no longer articulate herself. If the victim starts to cry, the courts say that this is clearly against their will.
“But there is this state of shock, a psychological state of emergency, when the victim can no longer move: The new rule would concern those cases.”
Sporrer added that the men would not necessarily have to obtain written consent from the woman before sex as proof.
Austria should, though, look to other countries that have already introduced similar legislation to see how their courts were dealing with the burden of proof of consent.
The sexual offences law reform was the first major project Sporrer has presented after taking offices in March 2025 as part of Austria’s new three-party government coalition.
The new plan echoed a demand by Sporrer’s fellow SPÖ MP Eva-Maria Holzleitner, women’s affairs minister.
On June 27, Holzleitner said Austria should take its cue from Nordic countries such as Sweden and Norway when it came to sexual offences law reform.
Sweden first introduced a so-called “consent law” in 2018, defining any form of intercourse where one of the participants had not actively signalled consent as rape.
The reform led to a surge in the number of rape cases. The number of prosecutions almost doubled in the first two years after the changes, from 236 in 2017 to 455 in 2020, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.
The burden of proof of consent has even spawned some creative digital solutions such as a variety of apps with which women can legally consent to sexual intercourse.
These, though, have apparently not been widely used. “I never heard of a single person in this country who used an app to consent to anything,” Julia, a 35-year-old woman from Göteborg, told Brussels Signal on July 14.
She added: “Most people in this country had sex at least once while drunk with a total stranger. Obviously, in this scenario, no one explicitly said ‘I consent’ or used an app.”
