Law tightened on child sex crimes (Korea)
Pedophiles are to be denied the benefits of the statute of limitations until their victims reach legal age and may face tougher penalties.
The government, during the Cabinet meeting yesterday, passed the revision bill on the sex crime victim protection law, said officials.
Child sex offenders are to be denied the benefits of the statute of limitations until their victims (under 13 years of age) reach the age of 20, according to the bill.
“Underage victims, due to fear and their limited communication capacities, are often unable to properly testify the circumstances of the crime,” said a government official.
“Due to new advanced investigation techniques, investigators may now better collect and preserve the necessary evidence such as the criminal’s DNA records.”
As long as the collected evidence is adequately preserved, the case may not be closed until the victimized child reaches maturity, the official said.
More: http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/NEWKHSITE/data/html_dir/2010/02/10/201002100048.asp
Police ‘ignore’ rights of sex trafficking victims (UK)
The police and immigration services may be illegally ignoring the human rights of foreign women who have been forced into prostitution, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has alleged.
The commission suspects the sexual exploitation of women from overseas is being treated routinely as an immigration issue, with the women often regarded as criminals rather than as victims of coercion, violence and trafficking.
It is launching an inquiry today headed by the civil rights lawyer Lady Kennedy, which will investigate whether the UK is failing to meet its duties under European and domestic human rights legislation.
“Human trafficking is recognised as a grave abuse of human rights, involving coercion and deception. It entails ongoing exploitation and its victims suffer untold misery,” Kennedy said. “This inquiry is about making a reality of people’s human rights and serving those whose rights have been violated.”
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Sex assault law gets legal boost (Massachusetts, USA)
Gov. Deval Patrick is expected to sign into law a bill that strengthens the protections for sexual assault victims.
Jane Doe Inc., an organization focused on ending domestic violence and sexual assault, says the law creates an enforceable civil restraining order for victims of sexual assault and stalking and closes a gap in protection.
The state House of Representatives passed the bill on Monday 153-0. It passed the Senate last November 37-0.
Anti-stalking bill tabled (South Africa)
Anti-stalking legislation which has been seven years in the making has made it to Parliament with the tabling of the Protection from Harassment Bill in the National Assembly yesterday.
The bill comes against high rates of domestic violence in the country and a recognition that the current recourse of a victim to a protection order or interdict has been largely ineffective. The bill provides that if an interim or final protection order is issued, a suspended arrest warrant will also be ordered to eliminate delays should the stalking continue.
It also provides for the seizure of firearms and other dangerous weapons from those accused of harassment, and provides that the lesser “balance of probabilities” civil test will be used in court rather than the “beyond reasonable doubt” used in criminal cases.
More: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=93227
Bill would help young prostitution victims , opponents say children “volunteered to be prostitutes.” (Georgia, USA)
Imagine your 12-year-old daughter has been kidnapped and, when she’s finally found, she’s been forced into a child prostitution ring. Imagine that she’s kept in a drug-induced haze and raped repeatedly. Imagine the horror, grief and shock that would overwhelm you and your family as you dealt with that situation, and the work you’d be eager to do to heal your daughter.
And now, in the middle of that trying and sensitive situation, imagine that the state of Georgia is labeling her a criminal.
Imagine what you would do.
State Sen. Renee Unterman, R-Buford, knows what she would do. She has proposed legislation that would establish a path of diversionary treatment for children under the age of 16 who are picked up for prostitution. Her bill would set up a system of care that would focus on education, prevention and increased opportunity for the victims.
And victims are exactly what they are.
According the the governor’s Office of Family and Children Services, there are more than 400 underage prostitutes on the streets in Atlanta. The city has been ranked as one of the worst in the country in terms of child prostitution. A 2002 FBI sting broke up 14 men who had grotesquely pimped dozens of girls, some as young as 10.
It seems like a no-brainer piece of legislation, right? Well, apparently not.
Various conservative Christian organizations in Georgia have joined forces to oppose the bill. At a rally outside the Capitol earlier this week, speakers slammed the legislation, with former state Sen. Nancy Shafer arguing “the very profitable and growing pedophile industry” would benefit from its passage.
Likewise, Sue Ella Deadwyler, a conservative Christian activist, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that, if passed, the bill would result in “an absolute cultural upheaval” in Georgia that would legalize prostitution. Deadwyler went on to question how many of the victims actually were forced into such behavior, and said most of them willingly volunteered to be prostitutes. Rally participants included the Georgia Christian Coalition and Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition.
More: http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/020710/opi_559550830.shtml
The deal: How Northern Ireland’s systems of policing and justice will change (Northern Ireland)
After years of political stand-offs and squabbling, at the stroke of a pen, policing and justice in Northern Ireland is finally to be handed over from Westminster.
But what are the main areas of policing and justice — and what changes will there be?
Policing: Unlikely to bring much change to police accountability, as the PSNI is already accountable to the Northern Ireland Policing Board. Police here already have similar powers to officers in England and Wales. Police funding, which is provided by the Secretary of State to the Policing Board, will become the responsibility of the Justice Minister, who will set police pay and conditions as well as making regulations providing for pensions. The Policing Board’s powers will not be diminished but funding will now be allocated from the Northern Ireland block grant.
Criminal law: A key part of the work will be creating and maintaining the criminal law in Northern Ireland through legislating for the creation of offences and related court procedures such as bail, proceeds of crime, road traffic offences, sexual crime. To include development of criminal justice policy in areas like sentencing and restorative justice and services for crime victims.
USF project aims to ID slain crime victims (USA)
One is known only as “Marie,” a teenage girl who was shoved into the path of an oncoming car on June 9, 1973.
No one knows the name of another, a woman found left in a trunk behind an oyster bar on Oct. 31, 1969. Nor of the man found shot to death in his hotel room on April 26, 1980.
What the trio has in common, aside from dying violently in St. Petersburg, is that they are buried in separate graves at the Memorial Park Cemetery in St. Petersburg. And next week, in a first-time, high-tech effort to identify them, their remains will be exhumed.
“It’s something we have to do,” said Brenda Stevenson, a civilian investigator with the St. Petersburg Police Department who works cold cases. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to close some cases and get some families some closure.”
On Friday, Erin Kimmerle, an anthropologist from the University of South Florida, and a group of USF students used ground-penetrating sonar equipment to help detect exactly where the bodies are.
After the exhumation, the medical examiner’s office will send bone and tissue samples from the remains to an FBI lab so DNA profiles for the three can be created. The profiles will then be run against a national database of missing people’s DNA to see if there are any matches.
There was no reason to exhume the bodies before, Stevenson said. The people died before DNA technology had developed enough to allow scientists to glean genetic fingerprints from bone or tissue samples. “DNA didn’t exist back then,” she said.
The missing-persons database itself wasn’t operational until 2001.
More: http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/feb/06/na-usf-project-aims-to-id-slain-crime-victims/
UK prison population should be cut by a third: parliamentary report (The Jurist, UK)
The UK Parliament Justice Committee [official website] released a reinvestment report [text] on Thursday urging the prison populations in England and Wales to be reduced by a third. The committee found that incarceration is a relatively ineffective way of reducing crime except for serious offenders, and the amount of repeat offenders could be more efficiently reduced through rehabilitation programs such as housing, employment, education, and drug and alcohol services. The Ministry of Justice, which is currently spending £4.2 billion on a new prison, claims that its current strategy of longer prison sentences, which incorporate rehabilitation services, is working and the number of repeat offenders has declined. According to the report, the new prison is a “costly mistake” and funds would be better allocated to local public services outside of the prisons.
More: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2010/01/uk-prison-population-should-be-cut-by.php
Miliary Sexual Assault Task Force urges more oversight and funding (USA)
The Defense Department office that oversees sexual assault prevention and response in the military needs a higher level of oversight and funding to continue on its path of progress, a task force created to assess the program told Congress members yesterday.
The department and the services have made significant improvements in how they handle sexual assault prevention and response, but more needs to be done, the co-chairs of the Defense Task Force on Sexual Assault in the Military Services told the House Armed Services Committee’s military personnel subcommittee. The task force issued its findings to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Dec. 1.
The department “overall has made notable progress in addressing sexual assault” since the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office was created in 2005, Louis Iasiello, co-chair of the task force, told the subcommittee. “At the same time, we found many opportunities for improvement.”
