Mental Health

Man Arrested for Rape Acquitted Due to Sexsomnia

By Cheri Cheng | Update Date: Apr 11, 2013 10:13 AM EDT

There might just be a biological answer for everything in the world. A 31-year-old Danish man was recently acquitted due to his medical diagnosis of being a sexsomniac. Although many people have not heard of this condition in which a person engages in sexual behaviors while still asleep, some health experts and doctors suggest that this condition is in fact real.

The sexsomniac in this case was arrested after two underage females reported him to the police. According to the 17-year-old girls, he had fondled them when they were sleeping. The girls were at his apartment in Copenhagen along with other people after the man had hosted a party back in 2011. The girls woke up almost immediately and reported him later to the police. After the testimony, the Glostrup court acquitted the man due to his mental illness.

When asked about that night, the man stated that he did not remember doing anything to anyone and that he had no recollection of assaulting them. After a series of medical tests to better assess the man's condition, the court concluded that he did indeed suffer from sexsomnia and thus, was not guilty of the heinous crime. According to reports from the court, the prosecutors do not plan on appealing the court's ruling.

Sexsomnia was invented in 2003, with the first ever research paper done on this rare sleeping disorder dating back to 1996. It is a sleep disorder in which the person performs sexual acts, such as groping, intercourse, masturbation and oral sex while still mentally asleep. Roughly 7.6 percent of the people who suffer from a sleeping disorder stated that they have engaged in sexual behaviors. The brains revealed that sexsomniacs are not awake during the acts, and thus, do not have any memory of performing them. Although this mental disorder can be very controversial, since several men worldwide have gotten rape charges thrown out of court, the medical community believes that it is a serious and real condition.

The condition is currently diagnosed via the analysis of the patients' NREM (non-rapid eye movement) during sleep and the condition is called NREM arousal parasomnia. People with the condition often have several underlying stress factors, making the condition somewhat treatable through therapy.

As absurd as the illness sounds, science claims that it is real.

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