성범죄에 대한 사회제도적 대응방안

Social Countermeasure for Sexual Crime

This essay had started from a proposition that the best way to prevent crime is to punish all the criminal acts without exception. For a criminal act to be punished, it first has to be investigated and prosecuted. Most sexual crime investigations start from reporting. However, the problem is that reporting rate is only low as 12.35%. Therefore, in order to effectively prevent sexual crimes, one must find the reason behind the low reporting rate and the way to eliminate it. The survey had been ran under the hypothesis that women believe exposing their history of being sexual crime victims would have a negative influence on their successiveness of the marriage life. The result confirmed such belief. Women fear the negative influence on their marriage because, from their point of view, who the spouse is has decisive effect on their lives and men prefer women with no previous sexual experience as their spouses. Having said this, number of things must be done to free them from report-preventing psychological pressures: Firstly, women must be welcomed to enter the public affairs; Secondly, the ideology of virginal purity must be mitigated; And thirdly, there needs a way to prevent them from having secondary damage. To promote women's entry into the public affairs, they must be free from child care pressure. Social cooperative child care system can help this enormously. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act has some provisions to carry out such system but the society still needs a more effective measure. On the other hand, women employment should also be improved actively because it is very hard to reform the current unfair system just by passively non-discriminating. To mitigate the virginal purity ideology, criminal penalties that foster such category. In these days, the general social consciousness is turning over to the legalization of both penalties and it seems that the adultery would be legalized prior to the prostitution. Lastly, secondary damage should be systematically prevented. The secondary damage is the direct cause for the low reporting rate. As of now, the participants of the investigation and the trial are prohibited from leaking out the classified informations and are punished upon doing so. However, damaging one's personality and honor is not completely prohibited yet. Since improving this regulation is quite limited, the introduction of victim's attorney system would be more appropriate. In the end, the criminal justice system is expected to function in a way to prevent sexual crimes effectively by improving reporting rate through revising regulations and adapting better systems mentioned above.