Rape laws should cover male victims - expert

However, many cases involve two adult males, such as a 2010 incident in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, where a male security guard "forcibly had sex with his roommate". The two had to settle out of court after the police told them the Criminal Law could not be applied to their case. That same year, another security guard in Beijing raped an 18-year-old colleague. He was sentenced to a year in prison for assault and battery.

Admittedly, many of the perpetrators in these stories are homosexual. But not all of them. The two suspects in the Shijiazhuang case said they were not gay, just drunk and sexually deprived. But these cases, when they come to light, invariably cause a backlash against gays. Some in the public, frustrated with the inadequacies of the law, equate sexual predation of this kind with homosexuality in general.

This gaping hole in the legal codes is especially glaring when it comes to cases involving adolescents. When sexual predators are teachers and their victims are teenage boys - boys above 14 but not yet 18 - there is no law to bring the attackers to justice or place the teenagers under legal protection.

But things will soon change.

The latest draft amendment of the Criminal Law, which the National People's Congress Standing Committee will soon review, has removed the gender specificity from the description of victims of sexual assault. Instead of "women", it has now become the gender-vague "others".

This will cover most of the male-on-male sexual assault and rape cases that have surfaced in the past decade. No longer will bruises from battery be necessary as evidence to convict a perpetrator of sexual assault.

As a matter of fact, the gender of either the perpetrator or the victim would be irrelevant. Granted, female-on-male sexual assaults are extremely rare, but if we broaden it to sexual harassment it is entirely possible. And if we take away the word "sexual", we'll know that exceptions exist relative to the rules.

While domestic violence is predominantly targeted toward women by men, around 15 percent of cases in China are the other way around. This is according to a report by a women's association, who said it surprisingly finds men occasionally showing up at its door for help. Most men would not swallow the pride to turn to professional guidance. (The same report indicates that 30 percent of Chinese households suffer from domestic violence.)

I first wrote about men as victims of domestic violence a dozen years ago and some readers protested that I was overstating the truth to cover up the extent of male-on-female violence. But I was merely reporting what the women's association discovered. I was not shocked by their revelation because I had empirical evidence to that effect. I had seen quite a few families in which the wives tortured the husbands in more ways than psychological.

Of course it may be difficult to draw a line between domestic violence and some forms of "fooling around" that involve violence. A survey on qq.com, one of China's most popular portal sites, reveals that one-fifth of men said they had been slapped in the face by their girlfriends and 40 percent of the female respondents said they had done so to their boyfriends.

Since this is an online poll and not necessarily statistically sound, I'd rather trust the figure from the women's association. I believe that the exceptions actually help prove the norm. Just because most cases of sexual assault, violence and harassment are men on women, people tend to brush it aside and laugh it off as improbable when it is men-on-men or women-on-men. The previous reluctance to amend the law may also be rooted in the conviction that including men in the category of victims would somehow trivialize the grievances of women in such situations.