Police have identified 2,734 people implicated in stalking or related crimes over the past three years, and stepped up patrols and officer training in preparation for the June enactment of a stalking prevention law.
After years of debate, the Legislative Yuan in December last year passed the Stalking and Harassment Prevention Act (跟蹤騷擾防制法), which is to go into effect on June 1.
Earlier in 2019, the National Police Agency instituted a plan to combat stalking, which included compiling monthly data on cases at risk of repeat offense.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of the Interior
The agency said that 2,734 people were implicated in stalking or related crimes between July 2019 and December last year.
Of those, 1,543 cases (56.4 percent) were classified as sexual harassment, while 619 (22.4 percent) were cases of domestic violence, although those cases after January 2020 were reclassified as a more serious criminal offense under the Domestic Violence Prevention Act (家庭暴力防治法) and therefore are no longer included in the agency’s stalking statistics.
About 8.7 percent, or 239 people, were implicated over contraventions of criminal law, such as coercion, indecent exposure, assault or offenses against privacy.
The agency also found 189 cases of workplace discrimination, 76 contraventions of social order — such as stalking “without justifiable reasons,” peeping or other unexplained harassment — and 59 cases of discrimination under educational law.
Under the new law, stalking is defined as behavior intended to repeatedly exert “anything sexual or gender-related toward a specific person against his/her will, which intimidates such specific person and sufficiently affects his/her daily life or social activities.”
It also lists eight activities that would constitute stalking.
Under the new law, police are authorized to issue a protective order if an initial warning is ignored within two years. A perpetrator could then be arrested if the order is contravened, with the option for preventive detention if approved by a court.
To ease the transition when the new law goes into effect, the agency said it would continue following its 2019 plan, and advise precincts on how to handle cases under current and future laws on an individual basis.
It also vowed to review incident hotspots and times of day when reports are made, and step up patrols accordingly, while also expanding regular patrols to include known harassers.
Since there is considerable overlap of domestic violence, social order, harassment and other types of incidents, the agency said it is working to improve officers’ familiarity with the new law and when to apply it.
For example, in New Taipei City, the number of sexual harassment cases decreased by nearly 10 percent between 2020 and last year, while the number of related criminal offenses such as coercion and obstruction of freedom increased by 11.3 percent, the agency said.
This shows that officers are gaining a better understanding of the nature of stalking and harassment, it said.
Officers’ newly instituted ability to issue protective orders and pre-emptively detain perpetrators is also expected to greatly reduce incidents and “fill in the last piece of gendered violence prevention,” it added.
Additional reporting by Hsu Kuo-chen
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
‘SIGN OF DANGER’: Beijing has never directly named Taiwanese leaders before, so China is saying that its actions are aimed at the DPP, a foundation official said National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) yesterday accused Beijing of spreading propaganda, saying that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had singled out President William Lai (賴清德) in his meeting with US President Joe Biden when talking about those whose “true nature” seek Taiwanese independence. The Biden-Xi meeting took place on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Peru on Saturday. “If the US cares about maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait, it is crucial that it sees clearly the true nature of Lai and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in seeking Taiwanese independence, handles the Taiwan question with extra
RSS