Punish same-sex predators

(China Daily)
Updated: 2007-03-07 07:00

A lawmaker has called for either an amendment to or a judicial interpretation of the Criminal Law to severely punish people who sexually assault members of the same sex.

"Same-sex sexual assaults seriously harm personal dignity and undermine social morality, but under the current criminal law the offenders often get away with a light punishment," said Fan Yi, a deputy to the 10th National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature, which opened on Monday.

Fan said the Criminal Law, enacted in 1979, included a clause that made sexual assaults involving members of the same sex, mainly males, a crime.

"It stipulated that sodomy should be punished as a 'crime of indecent assault'," he said.

The crime of indecent assault was discarded and replaced by four specific criminal offenses when the current Criminal Law was adopted in 1997, but same-sex sexual assaults were not mentioned at all, Fan said.

"As a result, the courts could hardly find any legal basis to punish same-sex attackers as rapists, and often had to render light sentences after convicting them of other offenses," he added.

In recent years, media have reported cases in which male employees were sexually harassed or abused by their male bosses, but the police were not able to file a criminal investigation due to a lack of a solid legal foundation.

Fan, who is president of foreign languages college of Ningbo University in East China's Zhejiang Province, said he planned to submit a motion to the NPC session regarding the issue.

"I suggest either the existing Criminal Law be amended to add the crime of same-sex sexual assault, which should receive the same punishment as the crime of rape, or the Supreme People's Court give a judicial interpretation to define same-sex sexual assault as a form of rape," Fan noted.

As a "violent crime" often targeting children and teenagers, said Fan, same-sex sexual assault must be severely punished to " deter potential offenders".

Xinhua

(China Daily 03/07/2007 page6)