You didn’t mention what country you are from so I can’t speak to this. Truth be told, I won’t likely know the legal structure of your nation.
For the US, there are federal laws and state laws but they actually are fairly clear. The problem here is not the law so much as it is ignorance of the law and how we talk about it. We tend to use the phrase “sexual assault" as a lump phrase catchall when perhaps another term would be better for generalizing or maybe we should just never generalize (that’s problematic too though). Because actual sexual assault is a felony, using the term in this manner causes confusion in regards to acts of sexual misconduct which need to be addressed because they are harmful but are not necessarily criminal.
Law is written in legalese and many people struggle with understanding the language use. So they choose to read opinion pieces that often explain, misinterpret, or even deliberately misinform the law to fill their education gap. That’s how you end up with frat bois who think that if they have sex with a girl who has passed out and she texts you the next day then it wasn’t rape. In reality, she may not remember… yet.
Again, religious conservatism here has prevented meaningful sexual education. As an American, when I hear an account of teen pregnancy because a 17 year old boy convinced a 14 year old girl that she couldn’t get pregnant unless they were both “oggulating" at the same time (true story ISYN), it’s embarrassing. If that’s the best we can do covering the absolute basics, how will we ever tackle more complex issues like consent and responsible dating adequately?
Another problem is our more recent spates of lawmakers. Republicans tend to vote based on religious principles and do not educate themselves about physiology or the issue at hand in regards to women’s bodies which is how you get Congressmen saying inane things like women can’t get pregnant by rape because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has a way to try to shut the whole thing down.”
Yeah. It’s gonna be hard to update, refine, and moderate your legal code when this is the quality of your representation. As a result, things like revenge porn and other acts of sexual misconduct in the digital realm (things that if they happened IRL you could be charged with menacing, stalking, harassment, etc have been consequence free for too long because legislation has not kept up with technological trends. So the legal code, while generally clear, is becoming antiquated and insufficient for modern life.
So what sorts of problems do you have with your legal code?
