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A Dutch court has found a man guilty of “stealthing” or removing his condom without his partner’s consent and forcing unsafe sex during a date in the summer of 2021. The court sentenced the 28-year-old from Rotterdam to a three-month suspended prison sentence and ordered him to pay the victim 1,000 euros, or about 1,075 US dollars, in damages for coercion.
The man, identified by local media as Khaldoun F., was cleared of rape charges on Tuesday. In a statement, the Rotterdam court said he restricted the victim’s “personal liberty and abused the trust she had placed in him” and put her at risk of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. It also said that broad interpretation of the law was needed to include bareback sexual penetration in rape laws.
The case — according to Dutch media, the first secret conviction in the Netherlands — is part of a growing global awareness of the nuances of consent. Experts say, while the term stealthing isn’t widely known, The experience is relatively common, with surveys showing incidence rates ranging from 8 to 43 percent in women and 5 to 19 percent in men who have sex with men, according to a recent review article examining data from around the world.
In a 2017 article Civil rights attorney Alexandra Brodsky, who brought the term into mainstream discourse, called the victims the act “rape in close proximity” and described it as a violation of physical autonomy. However, stealthing remains a matter of debate as to whether it should be banned and how it should be classified legally.
Efforts have been made in several countries – including Singapore, Switzerland, Canada and others – to bring criminals into legal action for stealthings parts of Australia – but the offense is not in the penal code in the Netherlands, where about 3 per cent of people experience physical sexual violence a year, according to a 2020 report by Statistics Netherlands.
In the United States, federal legislation that would have allowed victims to seek compensation for stealing was introduced in the House of Representatives last spring, but it didn’t make it through the committee. States like New York and Wisconsin have attempted to pass laws that would penalize stealthing, but so far only California has done so. In 2021, the state expanded its sexual battery laws to include what is also known as non-consensual condom removal, or NCCR, and to allow victims to seek civil damages.
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Kelly Cue Davis, a clinical psychologist and professor at Arizona State University who has studied stealthing, said the decision in the Dutch case reflected the complexity of the crime.
“What’s playing out in this particular court case is what a lot of people who’ve had stealth experience have grappled with,” she said, noting that many victims aren’t sure what to make of their experience. “The person in cloak consents to have sex, but they consent to having it in this particular way. And then it doesn’t happen like that.”
There’s also “a lot of confusion because people don’t know what to call it. People have never heard of it. You just know it feels bad,” she said.
This confusion and The deceptive nature of the act makes stealthing particularly underrated, Davis said. Some victims don’t know they’ve experienced stealthing until their partner tells them, they discover they’re pregnant or have a sexually transmitted infection — or possibly never.
“Of course, that’s really problematic when it comes to getting help from law enforcement, but also getting any kind of needed healthcare in a timely manner,” she said.
Tuesday’s sentencing was largely based on WhatsApp messages between Khaldoun and the victim, in which she asked if he had an STD and expressed concern that he removed the condom, after which he claimed he believed , she “felt” it.
In another case, a 25-year-old man was acquitted because the Dutch court was “not convinced” that the defendant had made a “conscious decision” to remove the condom without his partner’s knowledge.
Amar Nadhir contributed to this report.