Debate on sexual offences bill continues

Alicia Dunkley (Jamaica Observer)

DEBATE on the Sexual Offences Bill continued in Gordon House last week with lawmakers making additional recommendations as to how it could be further tightened before being passed into law.

Debate on the bill, which will amalgamate all laws dealing with rape, incest and other sex crimes, began in the House of Representatives on January 27. It will abolish the Incest (Punishment) Act and several provisions of the Offences Against the Person Act and has been in gestation for some 14 years.

Opposition Senator KD Knight, speaking during the debate in the Senate on Friday, said the painstaking review of the provisions was not to be seen as an attempt to delay the legislation but rather to avoid passing a weak law only to have sections of it successfully challenged in court, leaving offenders to go scot-free.

He said pertinent to the success of the legislation would be the investigative capabilities and proper infrastructure in the police force. In addition, Knight said the Act should criminalise instances where an individual who has a sexually transmitted infection and knows, still engages in sexual intercourse with their mate without telling them.

"It should be criminalised," he said.

Government Senator Hyacinth Bennett, citing concern over the 7,463 reported rapes between 2000 and 2008 and the 316 buggery cases over the same period, said the issue of sexual intercourse and gender identity needed to be settled in the bill.

Noting that under section two of the bill, 'sexual intercourse" is defined as the penetration of the vagina of one person by the penis of the other person, Bennett said given the times it should be specified that the sexual organs to which reference is being made are those present from birth.

"The sex organs should not include surgically constructed sex organs under circumstances such as where a person underwent a sex change," she noted. "It is conceivable that a man can claim to change his gender to that of a woman and have a vagina surgically constructed and then seek to be covered under the definition of sexual intercourse; maybe someone could even rename their sex organ as that of the opposite gender without surgery based on their change in gender identity."

Bennett added that given modern thinking in which gender identity relates more to which sex you identify with or how the person views himself or herself, "a person could try to challenge the very meaning of 'he' and 'she'.

"The definition of sexual intercourse must guard against these possibilities," she said.

In addition, the Senator said a reference to anal intercourse in the same sentence as sexual intercourse in section 24 of the bill "as if to say there were alternative forms of sexual intercourse" must be cleared up posthaste.

"So as not to cause any uncertainty as to what is meant by sexual intercourse, I would respectfully ask that what is referred to in Section 24 as anal intercourse be replaced with buggery which has always been used to describe such acts," Bennett insisted.

Furthermore, she noted that the act should make it clear buggery is a crime whether or not the participants consent to the act.

Opposition Senator Sandrea Falconer called for further resources for the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA), formally the Rape Unit to help make the act more effective, noting that the unit is currently severely understaffed with only 24 of the more than 40 personnel required. There is, too, a lack of female gynaecologists, she said.

The Debate continues next Friday.- 04.07.09