The man brushed off the grope, saying: "Love, you know I was joking".
A court ruling in Italy that found a 66-year-old school janitor not guilty of groping a student because the act only lasted less than 10 seconds has sparked outrage online.
According to CNN, a 17-year-old student at a school in Rome complained of being groped by the caretaker as she walked up a staircase with a friend in April 2022. She said that her trousers had fallen down from her waist and as she was pulling them up she felt a pair of hands touching her buttocks before the man grabbed her underwear and lifted her up by about an inch. "Love, you know I was joking," the janitor said, according to the teenager's testimony mentioned in the judgment.
During the trial, the man, identified as 66-year-old Antonio Avola, admitted that he had touched the student but that he had done it as a "joke". The judges then accepted the defence's argument that the act was meant to be a "clumsy joke" without "libidinous intent" towards the girl. They also ruled that the grope lasted "between five and 10 seconds" and was therefore too fleeting to be considered a crime.
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This decision caused outrage among students and sparked a viral trend on social media. Several users posted videos of themselves touching intimate body parts alongside the hashtags "palpata breve" (brief grope) and "10 secondi" (10 seconds). 'White Lotus' actor Paolo Camilli also posted a video with the caption "shouldn't the state protect us?" on his Instagram account.
Another video was reposted by Chiara Ferragni, Italy's most famous influencer who has 29.4 million followers on Instagram. Another influencer, Francesco Cicconetti wrote, "Who decides that 10 seconds is not a long time? Who times the seconds, while you're being harassed? Men don't have the right to touch women's bodies, not even for a second - let alone 5 or 10."
Women's groups also criticised the ruling saying, "The brief grope is harassment in all respects".