More than half of the nation's judges, prosecutors and lawyers have not received training for how to deal with sexual-assault cases, according to the Ministry of the Interior's Rape Prevention Committee (
The committee released the figure yesterday as part of statistics drawn from interviews with 200 judges, prosecutors and lawyers nationwide, that were conducted between November 2000 and October last year.
The committee, led by Minister of the Interior Yu Cheng-hsien (
"A judge needs to handle nearly 100 cases a month, sometimes more," a judge from the Taipei District Court, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Taipei Times.
"We want to carry out a precise and accurate trial every time, no matter what the case. We'd be more than happy to join any kind of training courses, but our heavy workload limits our time to do that, I'm afraid," the judge said.
Besides the need for training in handling and investigating sexual crimes, local academics said that "expert witnesses" need to be brought into the courtroom in these cases and that a mechanism should be put in place to make sure that happens.
"An `expert witness' can be a senior psychologist or a senior social worker who has dealt with victims or rapists," said Sandy Yeh (
Yeh said that the judicial system relies mostly on evidence collected from the crime scene and from rapists and the victims, such as fingerprints and DNA. But testimony from an "expert witness" could provide an appraisal of the psychological damage to victims or could help them speak out when they fail to testify for themselves in court, Yeh said.
"These people have a better idea of what the rapists were thinking or how the victims felt since they have helped these victims or been involved in rapist-rehabilitation projects," Yeh said. "Their testimony can also help outline the truth or clarify questions which judges might have.
"Actually, the committee is now working on making the mechanism a law because it shouldn't be just a mechanism, even we don't have the mechanism yet," she added.
Yeh said that professional appraisals or testimony from "expert witnesses" would definitely help the judges as well as prosecutors and lawyers to come up with a better understanding of a rape case.
Wu Chi-kwang (
"You cannot ask a judge or a prosecutor to know everything. For some things, it isn't fair," Wu said.
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