June 16 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Parliament of Japan has approved this Friday the rise in the minimum age of sexual consent from 13 to 16 years, a minimum age limit that had been in force since 1907 and that, according to organizations for the protection of women’s rights , covered a wide range of abuses against girls and adolescents in the country.
This decision comes on a day that the Diet has approved a reform of the country’s sexual offenses law that now criminalizes the recording of images of women without their consent.
All of these unanimously approved revisions seek to clarify the illegality of the crime of non-consensual sex in Japan, where the act of rape was legally identified as “forced sexual intercourse” in 2017.
The new law criminalizes even situations where the victim does not openly express their intention to resist, either due to the effects of alcohol or drugs or fear of the social position of their aggressor, which puts an end to a highly criticized circumstance. of the previous law, whereby the victim had to prove that they had been subjected to violence or intimidation prior to the abuse.
Although this new law criminalizes sexual relations with minors under 16 years of age regardless of their consent, it introduces an exception in the case of relations between young people between the ages of 13 and 15 with another person who is less than five years old as long as the contact is consented, points out the regulations collected by the official Japanese news agency Kiodo.
In addition, the term for the statute of limitations for the crime of non-consensual sexual relations also increases, which goes from 10 to 15 years, and if the victim is under 18 years of age, said term will not begin to count until he reaches this age, typified as the majority old in Japan.
Local women’s protection organizations have applauded this reform, although they warn that it falls short given the culture of rape established in Japan. “It is still very far from the reality that sexual crimes make up. In reality, it only scratches the surface,” explains the founder of the Be Brave Japan group, Ikuko Ishida, to the ‘Washington Post’.
In 2021, a deputy had to resign after indicating that it seemed strange to him to end up in jail for having relations with a minor under 14 years of age. In Nagoya prefecture, a court dismissed a case against a man accused of raping her daughter from the ages of 14 to 19 because the young woman herself was unable to show that she had openly rejected her advances. That year, the Japan National Police identified more than 5,000 arrests for taking pictures of women without consent, triple the number in 2016.
