Seal All Loopholes In Sexual Offences Law

Sex predators cause needless pain and suffering, especially life-long trauma for the victims.

It is worse when the victims are young girls as they are going to live much longer with the horrendous memory of the ordeal.

The culprits must, therefore, be relentlessly pursued and flushed out of hiding to suffer the punishment for their devious actions.

This is precisely why we fully support a campaign by human rights activists for a review of the laws governing sexual offences for more deterrent sentences.

This is what the victims and their families who are taken through this ordeal by the perpetrators of sexual offences deserve.

The activists have proposed a review of a section of the law that is often used by child molesters to escape punishment.

They have been stunned after the High Court freed a man who had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for defiling a 15-year-old girl.

And it was on rather ridiculous grounds that he ought to have benefited from his defencethat, owing to her body size, he believed the minor was an adult when he committed the offence.

The High Court quashed the conviction and set aside the sentence by a Magistrates Court.

The law provides that a person accused of child defilement can be found not guilty if it is proved that the minor deceived the suspect into believing that she was over 18.

There is something terribly wrong with that.

The convict should not get away with his crime just by saying he believed the child was as older as she said she was.

The judge followed the law but this ruling should be reviewed urgently.

The law should also be balanced in a way that leaves no loopholes for criminals to escape justice.

But it should also protect innocent suspects from an unjust sentence, whereby they are jailed due to a faulty or inadequate law.

Many sex pests have walked free for lack of evidence or poorly prosecuted cases, negotiated justice or backdoor deals among families, to the detriment of the hapless victims.