French law forbid any sexual relationship with anyone under 15 year old. Period. And no any journalistic claptrap about “consenting age” would change this fact. About the case you are talking about, translate a full news, eg here : https://www.20minutes.fr/paris/2139727-20170926-pontoise-11-ans-peut-avoir-relation-sexuelle-consentie-homme-28-ans
That made news scandal precisely because of miscarriage of justice by a rogue prosecutor who decided to qualify the 11 year old girl as “consenting”. But no matter the prosecutor said, the 28 year old perv is condemned anyway precisely because the consenting age is over 15 yo.
No, it wasn’t just one rogue prosecutor. As the article mentions, there was ANOTHER recent case in which a 22-year-old man was tried on the more serious charge of raping an 11-year-old, and the man was ACQUITTED because the prosecution couldn’t prove the sexual conduct wasn’t consensual (I include a link to Le Monde with the whole story at the end here). It ended up a he said/she said situation in court. The man had denied any relationship with the girl until he learned she’d gotten pregnant and gave birth. Then he said the sex was consensual, and her actions were scrutinized in court just like any adult rape victim’s would be. They said things like she wasn’t upset afterwards. They brought up she went with him willingly, though she said she had no idea what he’d do. She said he forced himself on her, but in the end, his claims that he didn’t and that she lied about her age to him (which she denied) convinced the jurors. He got off! The prosecution said perhaps they should have just charged him with the lesser offense, but they believed he forcibly raped her. And he got off just because sex between a 22-year-old and an 11-year-old ISN’T statutory rape in France today.
From Le Monde on how the case stirred outrage:
Suspended on the subject, Marlene Schiappa, Secretary of State for Equality between Women and Men, announces quickly that the government is working on a bill on “the irrefutable presumption of non-consent of children “ . Which means that below a certain age, an act of penetration of a minor would automatically be considered by the courts as rape. The irrebuttable presumption does not exist in criminal law.
About twenty associations call to protest in front of the Ministry of Justice, politicians comment extensively on the case - “to vomit” , seemed to summarize the president of the region Ile-de-France, Valerie Pécresse. The debate begins on the delicate question of the age of sexual consent. At what age is a minor mature enough to accept or refuse sexual intercourse with a person of full age: 13 years? 15 years? Can we really set an age limit?...
At the end of March, a bill against gender-based and sexual violence will be presented to the Council of Ministers. Among the measures planned, Secretary of State Marlène Schiappa proposes setting the age of non-consent for minors at 15 years . The public prosecutor, François Molins, suggests him, 13 years.
The current legal state in France is a pedophile’s dream. The present 5-year maximum sentence for sexual conduct with a child under 15 may seem like a deterrent for most law-abiding people, but it’s not much to a pedophile. He knows that to be charged with the actual rape of a child, with the long sentence, the prosecution will have to prove that the child didn’t consent.
And where it becomes really a pedophile’s dream is in not establishing straight-out that children can in no way consent, meaning things have been made very, very murky. They’re murky today between adults. Many children and their parents might be reluctant to even try to go to prosecutors since a pedophile would get at most 5 years, or the child would be put through the third-degree if the pedophile is actually raped, since prosecutors have to prove that an 11-year-old “didn’t want it,” like they failed to do in that one case.
This was an eye-opening, informative article which sheds some light on the claims by some of Roman Polanski’s defenders that people in “Europe” look at “adult-child sex” differently than Americans do.