Almost 2,000 children report being sexually abused every year in Taiwan, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital pediatrician Hu Mei-hua (胡美華) told a news conference on Thursday.
The sexual abuse of children involves the use of authority, violence or money to induce or force those under the age of 18 to engage in sexual acts, Hu said.
That includes lewd acts, sexual assault, sex in the form of prostitution or with the exchange of money, sexual touching or stimulation of genitalia, sexual intercourse, making or allowing children to watch pornography, using children to produce pornography, and live sex or sexual performances involving children, Hu said.
Citing Ministry of Health and Welfare statistics, Hu said that over the past 10 years, 41 out of every 100,000 children have reported being sexually abused, or an average of 1,935 cases per year, approximately 5.3 cases daily.
From 2001 to 2010, the typical age of the 91 children alleging sexual abuse who sought medical attention at the hospital’s emergency ward was 13 to 17, with 96.7 percent of them being girls, Hu said.
Thirty-two of the 91 children had been subjected to repeated sexual abuse, Hu added.
As many as 75 percent of the alleged perpetrators were family members or people known to the children, Hu said, adding that the abuse most often occurred at the child’s home or a place they frequently visited.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift