A Chinese lawmaker has called for amendment to or judicial
interpretation of the country's existing Criminal Law to severely
punish those making sexual assaults on victims 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 light punishment," said Fan Yi, a
deputy to the 10th National People's Congress (NPC), China's top
legislature, in its annual full session which opened Monday.
According to Fan, China's old Criminal Law enacted in 1979 used
to include a clause defining sexual assaults between same sex,
mainly male to male, as 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 Criminal Law currently
effective was adopted in 1997, but same-sex sexual assaults was not
mentioned at all, Fan explained.
"As a result, the courts could hardly find any legal basis to
punish those same-sex attackers as rapists, and often had to render
light sentences on them after convicting them of other offenses,"
he added.
In recent years, Chinese media have reported cases in which male
employees were sexually harassed or abused by their same-sex
bosses, but the police couldn't even file a criminal investigation
due to the lack of a solid legal foundation.
Fan, who is president of foreign languages college of Ningbo
University in east China's Zhejiang Province, said that he plans to
submit a motion to the ongoing 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 News Agency March 6, 2007)