Photo/Illutration The Nagoya High Court finds a father guilty of raping his daughter and gives him a 10-year prison sentence on March 12. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

NAGOYA--A high court here on March 12 found a father guilty of “quasi-forcible intercourse” with his daughter and sentenced him to 10 years in prison in a case that triggered protests in Japan.

A district court in March 2019 exonerated the 50-year-old father even while admitting he had sexually abused his minor daughter for years, generating outrage among women who felt the criminal justice system failed to protect them from sexual violence.

The Nagoya High Court, however, overturned the lower court's ruling on March 12 and handed down the prison sentence.

According to the ruling in the Okazaki branch of the Nagoya District Court, the father began physically abusing his daughter from when she was in elementary school. Sexual abuse began when she was in her second year of junior high school.

The district court branch recognized that the daughter did not consent to the sexual intercourse and had been placed under the psychological control of her father due to the prolonged period of abuse.

At the same time, the lower court ruled that the daughter had resisted her father’s advances in the past, meaning that her personality was not under the total control of her father. That led the district court branch to rule that reasonable doubt remained about certifying her as being in a state of “not being able to put up any resistance.”

Prosecutors appealed the district court ruling on the grounds it erred in recognition of the facts. They argued in the high court that the daughter had lost her will and desire to resist because of the many years of sexual abuse by her father.

Defense lawyers asked that the appeal be rejected.

The father was indicted for sexually abusing his daughter in August and September 2017 when she was 19 at a hotel in Aichi Prefecture. The indictment said the daughter was in a psychological state in which she could not resist due to many years of abuse at the hands of her father.

Under revisions to the Criminal Law in 2017, the crime of quasi-forced sexual intercourse refers to cases in which sex is non-consensual and the victim is too incapacitated by drugs or alcohol or due to psychological factors to put up resistance.

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