Under a new Australian law, having sex under the pretense of paying for it and then failing to pay is not merely theft, but may qualify as sexual assault. Harmeet Singh Saini was sentenced to six years in prison after failing to pay the $2200 that he owed to a Sydney sex worker and had apparently pulled the same trick on several others, mostly transgender women. These new consent laws came into effect in 2022 in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), and similar laws have been springing up in Europe since 2020. These laws are innovative in that they emphasize “affirmative consent,” a divergence from the previous common legal definition of consent as the absence of “no”. The NSW legislation also criminalizes “fraudulent inducement,” instances of someone not making good on a promise (i.e. payment), which under the law can now be deemed a form of rape, as witnessed in Saini’s conviction.
Where Failure to Pay Is Rape
