Bad criminal law treats child victims as prostitutes
- By Ni Tao
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, May 20, 2013
The cause celebre these days is the molestation case involving a primary school headmaster, a government clerk, and six schoolgirls in Wanning County, Hainan Province.
Shanghai Daily reported on Thursday that the two men were arrested on charges of molesting underage girls, but controversy is raging over the offenses for which they should be indicted.
After police released a medical report saying the girls, all sixth-graders, had no signs of sex abuse, their parents cried foul. Skeptical, some took their children to the hospital for another checkup, and countered the police finding, saying semen was extracted from the girls' vaginas, evidence they had lost their virginity.
Details of the case have been made public, including lurid tales of how the schoolmaster, surnamed Chen, and the official, surnamed Feng, enticed their victims to hotel rooms, and perhaps drugged them before allegedly raping them. Strangely, the full names of the suspects remain unknown.
While the suspects' identity is still kept under wraps, for no good reason, no decent concern is shown for the privacy of the traumatized victims.
After she read about a media debate on whether rape actually took place, a victim reportedly wept and said she didn't want to live any more.
A lot of talk about the case is inappropriately centered on the question of whether the girls' hymens were torn, a smoking gun in rape.
The smoking gun, yes, but such talk is rubbing salt into the wounds of victims. As their parents are skeptical of police and hospitals' conclusions, the girls might be taken elsewhere for more humiliating "fact-finding" checkups.
Rape victims don't often step forward to identify their perpetrators because they feel shame. But the girls of Wanning are being relentlessly reminded of the terror they were subject to, while what they need most is quiet, comfort and sympathy.
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