Judicial Cognizance Of Aggravated Circumstances Of Rape

The crime of rape, as an ancient crime, is a kind of criminal behavior which seriously does harm to women’s physical and psychological health as well as violates their sexual self-determination rights. As for the standard of gang rape, and raping female in public the common form of judgement, with injuries and deaths caused by rape, there exist various opinions and judgement among the theory of criminal law and judicial practices. The article adopts combined with standard explanation, critical analyses and case study, which tries to deal with the difficulty in judicial identification of gang rape as an aggravated circumstance, in hopes of deepening related theory,and drawing reasonable conclusion based on explanation, so as to benefit China’s judicial practice.This paper is mainly divided into three parts. The first part explores the judicial application of “raping women in pubic” and “having sexual relations with little girls in public”, holding the belief that “raping women in public” has to take place in public places and that “raping young girls in public” should belong to “the plot of raping the young youngest girl badly”, instead of “raping women in public”.The second part mainly discusses the judicial cognizance of “gang rape”. The author thinks that the “gang rape” belongs to the joint crime. Persons exempted and not exempted from criminal liabilities can be defined as gang rape instead of taking the responsibility of the accomplice into consideration. It can be classified as gang rape when two or more persons have the intention and action of the joint rape and one person commits the crime successfully. In the common rape occasion, the crime form should adhere to the principle of “part behavior, full responsibility” without violating this principle at will.The last part analyzes about judicial cognizance of the injuries and deaths caused by rape, centered around how to form an opinion on rape and the deaths and injuries it caused. When the victim commits suicide after being raped, this has nothing to do with the rapist from judicial aspect, so it goes against the aggregated clauses. If the victim is being raped and trying to seek help, during which process, the victim falls down and dies, the discretion of punishment should be made in terms of aggregated consequential offense.