Women's groups called for a new sexual harassment prevention law yesterday, calling current legislation outdated and judges' attitudes toward the issue "absurd."
To demonstrate the ineffectiveness of current legislation, the groups offered the recent example of a man who forcibly hugged and kissed a teenage girl working at a convenience store in Taoyuan. The Taoyuan District Court acquitted the man of sexual harassment on the ground that kissing reflected "internationally accepted manners," the groups said.
"Kissing the face is an internationally accepted form of behavior ... The defendant didn't rub the plaintiff's body with his sex organs," read the verdict announced by judge Fu Chung-lo (傅中樂) in August.
"Kissing is very common. It is objectively not an indecent act which is sexual in nature. It was a misunderstanding that the prosecutor considered the act of kissing the face as an indecent act."
The judge ruled that the plaintiff had interfered with another's freedom and handed down a sentence of four months' in prison.
Reacting to the ruling, women's activists said the sentence was "absurd," and criticized the judge's rigid adherence to the interpretation of case laws that "were outmoded and ignorant of social change."
Lawyer Wang Ju-hsuan (王如玄) criticized the existing legal definition of an indecent act as depending on whether there are sex organs involved. "It's a [sex] organ-oriented interpretation (器官化的解釋)," Wang said.
Activists called on a sexual harassment prevention law to be enacted by the legislature as soon as possible.
In February, Fang Yong-hsiang (方永享), 44, who had a previous criminal record, entered a convenience store in Taoyuan where a 15-year-old girl was working alone. He went behind the counter to hug the girl from behind and kissed her face for over one minute. The girl's colleague rushed out of the back room after hearing shouts and witnessed Fang fleeing through the store's door.
Prosecutor Lu Ning-li (呂寧莉) charged Fang with an indecent act and recommended imprisonment for three years. But Fu turned down Lu's indictment referring to case laws from 1928 and 1938, which point to a sexual definition of indecent acts.
Gao Fehng-shian (高鳳仙), a Taiwan High Court judge, said Taiwan lacked a specialized law regarding sexual harassment and that this hole in the legal system has caused increasing difficulties for judges as the number of harassment cases has gone up in recent years.
Gao called for a separate law regarding sexual harassment to be enacted in order to bring the legal system up to date.
Women's activists have been campaigning for a sexual harassment prevention law for years. Two versions of the law, drafted by Gao in cooperation with legislators and the Ministry of the Interior, have been completed, but have yet to be enacted.
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