COR Point 77 The Right of Marriage and Family Life
In early 2015, revisions to the Domestic Violence Prevention Act added the funding sources for the Violence Prevention Fund.140 However, the budget for the prevention of gender violence in the central government budget for 2016 was not increased but actually cut to NT$241,085,000, compared to over NT$260 million in 2014 and over NT$240 million in 2015. Even more worrying is that fact that the tightening of budget resources had been made even more serious by the expansion of the scope of application of this act had expanded after the revisions (through inclusion of children and juveniles who have witnessed family violence and victims of violence who are 16 years of age or older and victims of violence who have intimate personal relations but do not cohabit.)141
According to a MOHW survey conducted in 2015,142 26 percent of Taiwanese women have suffered violence from intimate partners during their lives, with the most common form being psychological violence which 21% have faced.143 We recommend that the government should estimate needed allocations for the prevention of violence based on the data of this survey and gradually expand the budget allocation to respond to the needs of society.
In recent years, the leakage and public dissemination of private sexual images without permission and the rise of new types of blackmail (such as revenge porn or sextortion) have worsened with the development of internet and social media technology have attracted the attention of the government. Official and unofficial studies in the United States, Japan, England, Australia and other countries have discovered that 80-90% of victims of revenge porn are women. Since revenge porn occurs most frequently as a means of revenge after the break-up of intimate relationships, such behaviour can also be considered to be a form of intimate violence.
An analysis of news coverage conducted by the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation in 2015 found that an average of 5.17 cases of revenge porn were reported every week, showing that this type of crime is now quite widespread in Taiwan, and that the age of victims was declining to include minors between the ages of 12-18.144 Once images of the victim are disseminated on the internet, they may rapidly spread to innumerable other websites and may be impossible to delete, thus causing irreparable pain to the victim. Nevertheless, the government has yet to take active action against such offenses and has failed to realize numerous obligations of the State under CEDAW, such as the following:
There is no national statistical data that can be used to estimate the reasons for the spread and the impact of this kind of violence;
Many victims have requested assistance from judicial agencies but have yet to receive active response and there are even examples of discrimination against victims on the part of judicial personnel, a situation which highlights the insufficient sensitivity in our country regarding the prevention of revenge porn and similar forms of sexual violence;
In Article 235 on the crime of “distributing obscene material,” the existing Criminal Code does not have provisions for responding to harm inflicted on the personality rights of the victim and the sentences imposed by the judiciary on perpetrators, often light sentences of less than six months’ imprisonment which, under Article 41, can be can be directly commuted to a fine at a daily rate of NT$1,000 - NT$3,000, have little deterrent effect;
Internet service providers should bear corporate responsibility for this kind of sexual violence, but the government has yet to use any binding laws or administrative orders to carry out effective monitoring of image downloading systems or internet service providers, thus making it very difficult for victims to demand the deletion of such images; and,
Since the flood of sexual content on the internet and the behaviour of many internet users has encouraged the spread of revenge porn crimes, but society and public opinion remain sunk in the misguided myth of blaming the victims, leading victims to frequently not dare to request assistance. In this regard, the State has yet to take the initiative to create an environment that can encourage female victims to request assistance.
We urge that the State should take the following actions: (1) immediately conduct a national survey on the extent of revenge porn criminal activity and disclose the findings of the investigation; (2) adopt appropriate measures to cope with revenge porn and other sexual crimes and review the revise existing laws and policies to carry out relevant sanctions, provide suitable protection and support services for victims and guide the social climate to eliminate this kind of violence against women; and (3) promote the enactment of laws that require internet service providers to fulfil their social responsibility to moderate the internet and establish mechanisms to assist victims delete harmful images.
- Revisions to the “Domestic Violence Prevention Act” were promulgated on February 4, 2015, including changes in Article 6 that authorized the central competent aency to establish a fund to reinforce the promotion of work related to the prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault. Financial sources for the new fund were to include government budget allocations, payments for deferred prosecution, payments for plea bargaining, dividends from the fund, donations, fines imposed in accordance with the act and other related sources of income.
- Proceedings, “Meeting to Study the Management and Utilization Methods for the Domestic Violence Prevention Fund,” Ministry of Health and Welfare, September 16, 2015.
- Ministry of Health and Welfare, “A Survey of Violence Suffered by Taiwan Women from Intimate Partners,” The survey was conducted in July-August 2015 and had 529 effective responses.
- Lee I-chia, “A quarter of women have faced violence: ministry,” Taipei Times, June 4 2016.
- Peggy Yu and Jonathan Chin “Most victims of revenge porn targeted by partners”, Taipei Times, Apr 1 2016.