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It took Eva Chan* more than a decade to find the courage to walk into a police station and report the sexual abuse she had endured for about six years at the hands of a family member she had lived with as a teenager.
Reporting the abuse back when she was 16, the year that the abuse had finally stopped, was unimaginable.
“There’s no professional support, as school social workers might not handle these cases often and might not know much about the process. [Reporting to the police] was like sending me to the slaughter,” she said.
When Chan finally filed her report recently, she struggled to recall the exact dates and times of each assault. Yet such details are essential for prosecution, as each offence must be treated as a separate incident under the law.
Chan’s story is common among countless survivors of persistent child sexual abuse who have struggled with how the court gauges the repeated sexual assault they suffered decades ago.
With Hong Kong due to overhaul its sexual offence laws this year, advocates have said it is time to fill this gaping loophole with a separate offence for this type of abuse.
Under a 1999 Court of Final Appeal precedent, each accusation must correspond to a distinct identifiable act of rape with sufficient detail to constitute an offence. In addition, prosecutors must prove separate and specific incidents of assault to secure multiple charges in cases of persistent sexual abuse, where victims had suffered repeated assault, often as children, over a long period of time.
Human Lam Hiu-man, a senior public prosecutor, said during a forum on sexual offences in October that the current legal framework tied prosecutors’ hands and prevented them from addressing the full scope of persistent abuse.
“There’s no difference in sentencing a defendant who had raped someone twice and [one] who had raped someone 100 times,” Lam said at the time.
Barrister Michelle Wong Lap-yan said a specific law targeting persistent abuse could help address prosecutorial challenges while meeting public expectations of protecting vulnerable children.
However, she cautioned that the measure could infringe on defendants’ rights. “The danger is, however, the serious detriment to the defendant because he may not know what exactly is alleged against him by the prosecution,” Wong said.
But for victims like Chan, a separate offence represents hope that future victims would not have to suffer the pain she had.
“If the offence was introduced in 2001, it would have covered me. But till today, when the abuse had been done and more than 10 years had passed, the law still wouldn’t cover my case and will never be able to do so,” she said.
Signing off,
Jess Ma
Reporter (Hong Kong)
Lunar member
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