BEIJING â€" When Yan Yinhong, having removed a pair of pants from under her long dress, did a handstand and exposed her leotard-covered crotch onto which she had painted the face of a Chinese policeman, she intended to shock.
Ms. Yan’s act was part of a bigger feminist art show on a recent Saturday afternoon: “Bald Girls: A Door.†Sexual violence was a key theme of the four performances, as this week’s Female Factor Letter explores. Another artist, Li Xinmo, put a razor blade in her mouth as she painfully told the story of a father raping his daughter in the shower. Blood seeped from her mouth.
Recent news reports about the sexual abuse or rape of school students by teachers has drawn attention to a normally hidden issue here.
For feminists, a law in force since 1997 is particularly galling: A person who has sex with a minor â€" the age of consent here is 14 â€" may not be automatically charged with rape if he can prove the sex was consensual and commercial. Known, literally, as “spending the night in a brothel with a girl child†â€" “piaosu younü†â€" article 360 of the Criminal Law is a target of children’s rights activists and feminists, who say men use it as a loophole to have sex with minors.
Feminists say the law damages children’s rights by voiding the notion of statutory rape. Rape of minors still exists as a crime, but men are using this legal loophole to get off lightly, they say, paying off or intimidating a victim’s parents to agree the sex was consensual or commercial. The crime carries a minimum of 5 years jail time, according to multiple Chinese media reports, but in practice, men have gotten off with fines and a couple weeks’ detention, according to legal experts. Rape carries the maximum penalty of death though it can also entail as little as three years jail, the Southern Weekly newspaper reported.
The law’s very name “disgusts†people, Southern Weekly wrote last year. “On Children’s Day in 2012, the author Han Han, raised the question: a girl child is girl child, rape is rape. What is ‘spending the night in a brothel with a girl child’? He said, this evil law must be repealed.â€
Southern Weekly cited Zhou Guangquan, a member of the National People’s Congress legal committee, as saying that a reason for creating the separate crime was related to the desire to lessen the use of the death penalty in China, bowing to “international pressure.†Its defenders pointed out that with a minimum of 5 years in jail, it was not a lightly punished crime, the newspaper wrote.
Yet Southern Weekly painted an arbitrary picture of how the law was created in the first place.
Revisions to the criminal law published by the Congress on March 1, 1997, held that commercial sex with minors “was still rape,†the newspaper cited Lin Wei, an expert on youth law, as saying.
“Twelve days later it had changed. On March 13, 1997, the meeting passed the draft law and it was a separate crime,†the newspaper wrote. The very next day it became law. How it all happened is “very hard to tell from publicly available information,†the newspaper wrote.
