英文摘要 |
The crime of indecent assault against children in Article 227 of the Criminal Code has been a controversial issue of concern to the public in recent years. Observed from the perspective of social phenomenon, in addition to the factor of biological instinct, the public’s attention to “sexual subject rights” also implies the affected personal feelings in the internalized process of sexual values constructed by society. Moreover, the involved complex collective psychology of mass society has made protection for children and adolescents’ right to sexual self-determination more complicated and difficult. Ever since the amendment to our national Criminal Code in 1999, offenses against sexual self-determination have been independent from the sex offense in "good customs" protection which makes sexual self-determination a core personal legal interest in the protection of personal sexual subject rights. However, there has been controversy over whether the protective legal interest of Article 227 in the Criminal Code belongs to sexual subject rights and should be included among crimes against sexual self-determination. Based on sexual self-determination as a starting point as well as children and adolescents’ sexual self-determination rights as the core of the research, the present paper discusses issues of legal interest, regulatory instruments and system positioning regarding Article 227 of the Criminal Code. This study first explores the meaning of sex within the discourse of “Sex”, and notes that the importance of sex in contemporary society is not limited only to biological or reproductive functions, but also implies meanings of many social collective values constructed by social norms and language. Observation of the phenomenon of “non-sexual expectations" and "sexual taboos" held by society towards children and adolescents, as well as the influence of social norms and social learning on individual’s internal beliefs leads to the belief that collective social anxiety may be transferred to children and adolescents during the process of socialization. Secondly, this study carried out an analysis of the change in legal interest in the Criminal Code from the whole to individuals, and explores the concept connotation of sexual self-determination which includes different definitions and theoretical controversies over sexual self-determination legal interests, the role played by sexual self–determination in the context of basic rights/human rights, the distinction between sexual self-determination and freedom legal interest, the common core interest and its starting point which sexual self-determination intends to protect. It then attempts to establish an independent sexual self-determination concept free from the context of abstract moral and legal interests. This article adopts a broader definition of sexual self-determination, including personal internal and external processing rights regarding sexual matters. However, owing to considerations of inevitable mutual interventions of individual sexual fields in social group life, a normative narrowing was then adopted through the measurement of interests. This study continued to analyze the interpretative views of protective legal interest in Article 227 of the Criminal Code, which has recently gradually become the theoretical mainstream, namely, the connotation of “the (undisturbed) ‘sexual development’ and ‘overall development’ of children and adolescents ". The term "sexual development" may imply two concepts: first, it refers to the “correct” sexual life, behavior and values created by a majority of people under the guidance of an abstract human sexual development path; however, in practice, the Criminal Code is unable to replace the role of sexual educators in determining people’s movement towards mainstream sexual values. Second, it refers to the developmental space of individual self-shaping field of space with reference to other disciplines on human development phenomenon observation. In view of the instability during the highly sexual development stage as well as under the influence of individual sex value and sexual recognition caused within the social norms of children and adolescents, the Criminal Code specially set up protection provisions to reallocate rationally through regulations the psychological load range and risk scale that the individual should bear in the developmental process of the sexual field. Finally, the present paper suggests that the so-called sexual development concept is one of corroborating evidence for criteria in judging the strength of harassment, persistence as well as psychological overloading of sexual self-determination, rather than the independent protective legal interest in the Criminal Code. Based on such a theoretical foundation, this study further conducts a comparison for relevant constituent element designs and norm systemic positions between German laws and our own. |