There’s a limit to how long you can make a headline, but we would have liked to have added that the girl suffers from near complete blindness.

Although the case has come up now the incident took place in an abandoned cortijo in Motril in August 2012. The victim had arrived at a party with her twin sister.

The 22-year-old man, who faces 13 years’ imprisonment, claims that he neither realized that she has an 82% handicap for blindness nor that she was only twelve, when he took the girl, who had consumed some alcohol, into one of the rooms and allegedly sexually abused her against her will.

José Antonio B.M., married with two young children, claimed that when he went into the room with her, “nobody had tried to stop them.”

According to the victim, who gave evidence from behind a screen, he had suggested that she accompanied him after they had danced together, but she had repeatedly refused, which was when he allegedly picked her up and carried her into the room, where he forced her.

She also said that her sister had tried to enter the room but he had prevented it. When she managed to leave the room, she told her sister what had happened, she said, and that they had immediately left the party, together with another adolescent.

According to witnesses at the party, the ‘couple’ had kissed before entering the room and after leaving it and that the sisters had stayed until the end of the party.

The mother had realised by the girls behavior that something was up and had taken her to the medical centre where traces of sperm belonging to the accused were found.

The doctor who examined her, however, said that the victim had told him that the encounter was consented and that “she was not worried about it.”

Editorial Comment: Even under Spanish law, which remains ridiculously lax over sexual relations with minors, a 12-year-old cannot be considered to have given her ‘consent’ precisely because she is a minor and lacks adult judgement.