성폭력범죄자의 처벌에 관한 법리적·정책적 제 문제

Recently, the policy on sexual violence in Korea has been consistently focused on severe punishment. The reason for such policy is that sexual violence against children has become a serious issue in Korea. A series of high-profile cases have occupied the attention of the public, so the general consensus is that the legal system is lenient with pedophiles, and punishes them with insufficient prison sentences. Under the influence of such public opinion, various criminal sanctions - severe punishment, risk management with community notification, electronic monitoring, chemical castration, and the withdrawal from treatments for sexual predators - were introduced to the Korean criminal system. In particular, the acts related to sexual violence stipulate that any sexual violence against children should be punished more heavily than that against adults. Of course, it is necessary that a highly risky sexual offender should be punished more heavily. But the “exact punishment” and “re-socialization through treatment” are considered to be more important than “severe punishment.” Therefore, the acts related with sexual violence should be improved so that the imbalance between a crime and a punishment is solved, and the problem of double punishment be minimized. Sexual violence is a kind of crime which occurs in a variety of forms due to a large number of factors, so a sexual offender may need a discriminative sanction depending on individual cases. It is important that a therapeutic action be taken in such a discriminative sanction.