According to two social service groups, 91 percent of Taiwanese people support legislation that covers instances of sexual harassment such as groping and giving unwanted kisses. Legislators and government officials, meanwhile, disagreed over who should be responsible for investigating sexual harassment cases.
The survey of 1,093 adults across the country was sponsored by the all-female Pei-An Rotary Club in Taipei (
Members of the two groups are among activists who are pushing for the passing of the Sexual Harassment Prevention Bill (
PHOTO: SEAN CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
Judge Gau Fehng-shian (
"If this bill is passed, legal definitions of sexual harassment and unwelcome groping will be established. Further, comprehensive resources will be made available to victims and a penal code for offenders will be put in place," Gau said at a public forum yesterday at the Legislative Yuan.
Earlier this week, a new draft of the bill was introduced by a number of female legislators from various political parties. The legislators included Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chou Ching-yu (
According to the draft, the Ministry of Interior would set up a sexual harassment committee to conduct mediation between victims and offenders in cases of sexual harassment as well as to provide healthcare resources for victims.
Remarking on the possibility of a setting up a specialized unit to investigate cases of sexual harassment, Lin Tsyr-ling (
"Our committee's staff has been working on sex-related offenses for a long time and experience tells us that offenders simply do not admit to their offenses, so conducting mediations would be problematic. Besides, the ministry will be short-staffed if every sexual harassment case needs to be investigated personally," Lin said.
Lin said that no other developed countries had put authority for such an investigative unit directly under a government body responsible for social policies, as sexual harassment cases may involve legal, labor, academic or other issues.
In 1999, the Modern Women's Foundation (
The Executive Yuan decided to dismiss the Sexual Harassment Prevention Bill because the draft did not define the venues in which offenses covered under the bill might take place, as was the Gender Equality Labor Law, which includes regulations pertaining to workplace sexual harassment.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching