현행 성폭력범죄 대처방안의 문제점과 개선방안

Abstract

In recent years, in response to the rapidly increasing number of sex offenses as an emerging serious social problem, the government has been devoting to explore various measures including enacting or revising laws as follows: Revising “Penalties for Sexually Violent Predator and Victim Protection Act”(hereafter “Sexually Violent Predator Act”) to allow the court to impose a death sentence for a sex offender who commits rape children under age of 13; Revising “Children Protection from Sex Crimes Act” to register personal information of the convicted sex offender against children with the local office/police to be open to the public as a community notification; Enacting “Electronic Monitoring of Certain Sex Offenders Act” to require a released sex offender to wear a electronic device during certain period to prevent the recidivism; Revising “Civil Committment Act” for the confinement of sexual psychopaths who suffers from mental abnormality such as paraphilias, pedophilia or sexual sadism and commits a sexual crime subject to be incarcerated. However, these measures seems likely to have some problems as follows: The definition of ‘sexually violent offence’ is so vague that it could violate the ‘void for vagueness’ principle; Sentencing death penalty for the sex offenders who rape children under 13 is likely to be impractical because our country has not executed anyone since 1997; Any regulation or program has not been established yet to implement the electronic monitoring for sex offenders; and any medical treatment program for sex offenders has not been operated in the prison or hospital so far. If these problems were not be addressed quickly, sex offences will occur frequently in the future and ordinary people will lose trust in the law itself as well as the government. Therefore, in order to make these newly-made countermeasures effective and practical by solving discrepancies among the current regulations and special legislative acts for sex offenders and offences, we need to make sex crimes and procedural rules incorporated into the sections of the Criminal Law and the Rule of Criminal Procedure for the regulatory consistency; execute death penalty for certain sex offenders; make effective and practical rules to supervise the released sex offenders such as community information (so-called Megan's Act in the U.S.) and electronic monitoring.