On The Application Of Strict Liability In The Crime Of Adultery And Young Women

Strict liability is a characteristic system,which has developed a long time in the common law.Protecting young girl is a principle that most countries insist in criminal law, especially when concerning sexual crimes.The statutory rape carrying through the strict liability is one of the representative crime. In the past, experts in China always hold a negative view towards the strict liability, considering it as the inculpation in objectivity. But recently, scholars have become increasingly open to it,and begin to discuss the appliance of strict liability in Chinese criminal law from a more objective perspective.By dissecting strict liability,this paper holds the view that relative strict liability can be included in Chinese Criminal Law, and be applied in rape of young girls under 14. Specifically, in the first chapter, it discussed the origin, definition and the scope of the strict liability. In the past, our mainstream views always considered strict liabilities as absolute responsibilities. But it is just a one-sided view. By comparing strict liability with the concept of absolute responsibility, this paper holds the view that the strict liability and the absolute liability are crossed, and strict liability can be subdivided into absolute strict liability and relative strict liability in different situations. The relative strict liability is actually the presumption of fault. It rules out the punishment of the innocence by setting the reason of the defense and inverting the burden of proof, and so it can be included in Chinese Criminal Law. In the second chapter, from the perspective of comparative law, it studied the legislative characteristics of the anglo-american law system and the civil law system. And then studied the relevant legal provisions of the rape of young girls under 14 in Chinese Criminal Law, especially the 2003 judicial interpretation. This paper holds that 2003 judicial interpretation is not applicable because of its deficiency of the principle of protecting young girl in sexual crime, which resulted in the strong collision with public view. In the third chapter, this paper states the reasonableness of relative strict liability in raping young girls under 14, concludes that the focus of controversy does not lies in whether strict liability punishes the innocence,but in whether raping young girls with negligence should be punished. The act of negligent rape of young girls creates a result that is harmful to society,and the perpetrator is manipulable to the whole of his or her actions, so that the offending acts should be punished by criminal law. And this paper also holds that at the present stage, the practice of the criminal law has indulged the punishments for the indirect intentional acts, and the latest judicial interpretation has actually set the rule at punishing the criminal negligence. The latest judicial interpretation has made a lot of progress, but still has many shortcomings. It established a presumption in deliberate crime, which is too easy to be fit in and actually put the negligent rape into its penalties. Such presumptions has actually equaled the sentencing standard in deliberate rape with negligent ones, which is too heavy for the latter. We should reconstruct the crime from the Criminal Law with relative strict liability,and complete it in both convicting and sentencing. At the end of this chapter, it reconstructs the rape of young girls under 14 with relative strict liability. The final chapter summarises the viewpoints of this paper,considering that when dealing with the crime of raping young girls under 14, relative strict liability has more advantages in protecting young girls, and is more practical in proving crimes and more suitable in responsibility and punishments to the crime.