It is clearly time for Japan to step up public debate on eliminating sexual crimes, and take steps to ensure that sex offenders are properly punished and victims are adequately protected.

The government will set up a new framework for discussions among ministries and agencies concerned to work out plans to eradicate sexual crimes.

The Justice Ministry will start discussing whether any revision to the criminal law to promote the cause is necessary or what kind of change should be made.

The moves come after a series of high court rulings that convicted the defendants in sexual crime cases by overturning the lower court decisions to acquit them.

These high courts reversed the district court rulings handed down last spring that found the defendants not guilty while acknowledging that they had sexual intercourse against the will of their victims.

The district court decisions to acquit the defendants shocked many people into staging “Flower Demonstration” protests against sexual violence.

The most high-profile case involved a man accused of sexually abusing his daughter, who was 19 at the time.

The Nagoya District Court’s Okazaki branch acknowledged that the daughter did not have consensual sex with her father. However, it acquitted him of the charge of “quasi-forcible intercourse” on the grounds that she was not in a situation where it was “extremely difficult to resist” his attempt, a requirement for declaring him to be found guilty.

The district court cited past cases where the victim successfully rejected advances from her father.

But the Nagoya High Court reached the opposite decision after questioning the psychiatrist who conducted a psychiatric test on the victim and sentenced the defendant to 10 years in prison

After the high court ruling, the victim said she had been “like a doll.” The trial has served to remind society afresh of what could happen to victims of long-term sexual abuse.

Many victims of sexual violence find themselves paralyzed both mentally and physically and incapable of resisting when they are assaulted. Victims could also exhibit what seems to be consensual behavior, especially when the attackers are someone close to them, out of fears of losing their daily lives or their identities.

Such aspects of the psychology of victims of sexual crimes have become widely known in recent years.

A lack of resistance that was once considered to be a sign of consensual sex could actually be a result of the extraordinary state of the victim’s mind. This fact is taught in judicial training programs.

But the lower court trial of the man accused of sexual abuse against his daughter has brought to the fore the fact that the issue has yet to be widely understood within the judicial community.

It is more important than ever for people involved in investigations into sexual crimes or trials of sex offenders to have sufficient and accurate expert knowledge about these issues in dealing with individual cases.

There are also problems with the legal system to deal with such cases that should not be overlooked.

For sexual intercourse to be adjudged a crime, it needs to involve resorting to “violence or intimidation” or taking advantage of the victim’s state of being “non compos mentis" (not of sound mind) or incapacity for resistance.

Many critics argue for abolishing this requirement to make all forms of non-consensual sex a punishable crime.

This issue was also debated actively when the criminal law was revised in 2017 to mete out harsher punishment against sexual crimes, but the argument was not accepted.

There is some truth to the contention that scrapping this requirement would lead to endless disputes over whether there was consent and produce false charges.

But there is a global trend toward considering all forms of non-consensual sexual intercourse to be a crime.

A criminal law provision stipulating that forcing sex against the other's will is a violation of sexual freedom and is illegal would have great significance for the cause.

The Flower Demonstration movement has underscored the fact that many victims of sexual abuse in Japan have been forced into silence. Society should respond to the call.

--The Asahi Shimbun, April 2