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.
Ignorant of the law
Some press also blundered badly in ethnics, whether intentionally or not. In zealously inquiring about who contacted whom first for the fateful rendezvous - the girls or the headmaster - they are oblivious to the harm they are doing and are ignorant of Chinese law.
Under China's Penal Code, having consensual sex with underage girls is considered rape. So it doesn't matter who asked whom out first. The innocence of the children is not to be exploited by devious pedophiles. Media obsession with damning details helps none other than the sex perverts, who in their own defense alleged the girls voluntarily had sex with them and got paid in return.
What responsible journalism should be doing now is to zero in on the wrongheaded clause that emboldens the likes of Chen to prey on their targets.
The clause, a 1997 amendment to the country's criminal law, stipulates that consensual sex with girls under 14 carries a prison term of five to seven years. The amendment was aimed at distinguishing with rape of minors, a crime punishable by the death penalty.
Over a decade, it has been increasingly observed that the clause was responsible for the the spike in rape cases involving minors. The rapists are occasionally officials, some of whom believe that sexual intercourse with virgins can boost their health and stamina.
With deterrent of the death penalty gone, many monsters have little to fear for the consequences of their crimes.
Criticism of the clause first gained momentum in April 2009, when several officials in Xishui County, Guizhou Province, were prosecuted on charges of having sex with minors whom they had actually forced into sex slavery.
The convicts were given jail terms ranging from seven years to life imprisonment.
Another high-profile case in which the defendants cited the amendment as extenuating circumstances occurred in 2011, when seven township officials in Shaanxi Province raped a 12-year-old girl and said "she did it of her own accord." They were found guilty and sentenced to three to seven years in prison in 2012.
No doubt the clause in itself is demeaning, portraying the victims as child prostitutes.
As the Wanning case proceeded, we were again shocked at the expose on Thursday that a primary school principal in Anhui Province had sexually assaulted nine female pupils over 12 years, without being detected.
It is no exaggeration to say that the 1997 amendment has opened a Pandora's box of child sex abuse, to the delight of pedophiles.
China should consider the practice in South Korea and Germany, where pedophiles could be punished with chemical castration, suggested an angry commentator in Thursday's Guangzhou Daily. But perhaps no measure would work better than the immediate repeal of a law that goes too easy on scum like the duo in Wanning.
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