Sidelights | The Distance Between Punishment and Healing: Rethinking Justice for MeToo Survivors

"Can the judiciary truly offer victims an opportunity to breathe and heal?"

In recent years, the #MeToo movement has continued to drive society to re-examine the issue of sexual violence. People increasingly expect the judiciary to act as an impartial third party, responding to victims' suffering through investigation, trial, and punishment. However, can the legal system truly deliver the justice that survivors expect?

In this lecture, Jen-Yu Peng, Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, drew upon her new book The Mirage of the Home and her years of fieldwork experience accompanying survivors of domestic sexual violence, guiding participants to rethink the distance among the legal system, trauma, and healing.

I. The System Has Done Much, So Why Has the Harm Not Receded?

At the very beginning of the lecture, Jen-Yu Peng reminded everyone that legal terms, elements of criminal offenses, and procedural norms may not fully capture the trauma a person has truly experienced.

Over the past 30 years, Taiwan has established a relatively comprehensive protection network: local governments have set up domestic violence and sexual assault prevention centers, counseling and support resources have been progressively established, and organizations and schools of a certain scale are required to set up gender equality and grievance mechanisms. However, even as the system appears increasingly refined and the government repeatedly declares a "zero tolerance" policy toward sexual violence, the actual number of reported cases continues to rise year by year.

Jen-Yu Peng shared her observations from her past service as a gender equality committee member: even within a work environment with exceptionally high average levels of education, supervisors leading gender equality investigations may still severely lack "gender equality awareness," habitually evaluating incidents through traditional gender ideologies, or even attempting to frame cases of coercive sexual harassment as "private disputes." This illustrates that no matter how rigorous legislation may be, if the individuals executing the system lack sensitivity toward trauma and gender power structures, the system will still fail.

When victims find that the system cannot manifest justice, they often have no choice but to resort to large-scale social movements like #MeToo, mobilizing public opinion to become their support.

II. Foreign and Domestic Cases: The Inherent Limitations of the Judicial System

To illustrate the limitations of the judicial system when confronting deep-seated trauma, Jen-Yu Peng shared two typical cases of "intrafamilial sexual assault" from France and Taiwan:

1. The French Case: The Misplaced Focus of Litigation

A French teenager in the 1990s had been subjected to long-term sexual assault and forced prostitution by her father since childhood. At the age of 12, enlightened by sex education at school, she gradually realized that this father-daughter relationship was extremely abnormal and painful, prompting her to seek help from a neighbor and subsequently initiate statutory legal proceedings.

However, this protracted litigation spanning several years—from her adolescence into adulthood—ultimately resulted in a judgment that she found unacceptable and unjust. Judges and prosecutors did not indict her father for the crime of "sexual assault" because "words alone carry no proof"; in the absence of objective physical evidence, the victim's statements were insufficient to secure a conviction on their own. The father was ultimately sentenced because he was involved in a pedophile network composed of highly educated individuals that trafficked children for "sexual services."

For the young girl, her initial demand was very modest—she did not want to destroy the family, she merely hoped her father would "stop" and her mother would believe her. But once the judiciary was activated, her family was completely torn apart. After her father was released from prison, he viewed himself as a victim "sent to prison by his daughter," subjecting her to over twenty years of stalking and harassment. The legal system not only failed to provide a line of defense, but instead plunged the victim into even deeper isolation.

2. The Taiwan Case (Xiao-Xi): Dissociative Identity and the High Wall of the Statute of Limitations

Another case is that of Xiao-Xi, whom Jen-Yu Peng accompanied closely for many years. Xiao-Xi was sexually assaulted by her father starting at the age of 4, and the abuse continued until she was 24. Years of extreme trauma caused Xiao-Xi to fracture her personality as a means of self-preservation, which under mainstream psychiatric frameworks might be diagnosed as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).

Xiao-Xi had reported the abuse twice. During the first report, the judicial and police procedures required intensive processes such as taking statements and medical examinations to be completed in a short period of time, and the opposing party (the perpetrator father) was notified immediately. This exerted immense familial pressure on the victim (her father's verbal abuse and her mother's emotional blackmail). Even more difficult was the fact that the "adult personality" facing society and giving the statement neither remembered nor was willing to recall the details of the trauma; meanwhile, the "child personality," who possessed the complete trauma memories, could only fall into extreme screaming and self-blame once awakened, rendering a coherent statement entirely impossible. The first report ultimately concluded with the case being closed because the statement could not be processed, and the social work supervisor concluded that it was impossible to clarify whether the sexual violence described by a psychiatric patient was true.

The second report was accompanied by Jen-Yu Peng throughout the entire process. The prosecutor at the time possessed a strong trauma-informed perspective, understood the state of psychological dissociation caused by trauma, allowed Jen-Yu Peng to accompany the interrogation, and even managed to piece together fragments of abuse suffered at different ages during a private conversation with Jen-Yu Peng alone. However, even though the prosecutor believed the sexual assault was true, the time point at which Xiao-Xi could clearly describe the details in adulthood had already exceeded the legal statute of limitations at the time. As for recent incidents that were not time-barred, they faced the evidentiary dilemma of her father denying everything and her mother claiming that "this child has had mental problems since childhood." In the end, bound by the legal limitations of exceeding the statute of limitations and insufficient evidence, the prosecutor could only use deeply empathetic phrasing in the non-prosecution disposition to implicitly acknowledge that the sexual assault had occurred, serving as a faint emotional support for Xiao-Xi.

These two cases jointly point out: The core task of criminal justice is to ascertain criminal facts, deciding whether to invoke state public authority to deprive a defendant of their liberty based on the strict principle of evidence-based adjudication; its essence was never intended to care for or heal victims.

III. The Predicament of Correctional Treatment: The Defensive Perpetrator

Jen-Yu Peng further categorized the "perpetrators (or defendants)" within the judicial system into three types: those who are truly falsely accused (an extremely low proportion in practice), those whose guilt is established by solid evidence and sentenced, and those "who actually committed the acts but were let off due to insufficient evidence or exceeding the statute of limitations" (which often accounts for an extremely high proportion).

Even in the few cases where perpetrators are successfully convicted and sent to correctional institutions (prisons), it is difficult to witness genuine remorse. At present, the purpose of sexual assault treatment in Taiwan's correctional institutions is highly functional and often reduced to mere formality. To earn sentence reductions and parole points, perpetrators smoothly cooperate with psychological counseling or religious instruction, yet remain in an intense state of "defense" internally. Some even develop distorted defense mechanisms in their psychology, shifting the blame onto the victims (for example, claiming that "that young child seduced me").

In addition, working conditions for counselors inside correctional institutions are poor, and they lack professional training tailored to trauma and sexual violence counseling. When young psychologists enter prisons with the enthusiasm to explore a perpetrator's psychological trajectory, they are often met with cold water poured by veteran correctional officers: "Don't waste your energy; these people are incorrigibly malicious and wicked." Under such an environment of high domestication and suspicion, perpetrators seek only to get through ten sessions, leaving no opportunity whatsoever to embark on genuine self-understanding and moral reflection.

IV. The Core of Healing: The Perpetrator's Admission and Witnessing by Others

"A perpetrator's admission is an extremely crucial component for a victim's repair and healing."

Jen-Yu Peng pointed out that for most victims encountered in practice, their core demand is often not for the perpetrator to die, nor is it for exorbitant compensation, but rather for the perpetrator to look them in the eye in front of others and honestly admit: "Yes, I indeed did this to you back then, and this is not your fault."

The nature of sexual violence often unfolds in intensely private spaces without any witnesses, causing victims to be trapped for years in a nightmare where they "have no way to clear their name." Therefore, healing requires two core conditions:

1. The perpetrator's admission.
   
2. A third party's witnessing, allowing the victim's experience to be heard and acknowledged in a relatively public and respected public setting.
   

However, the current criminal justice system is an "adversarial" system. To escape legal punishment, a perpetrator's instinct is inevitably a blanket denial and a defensive posture. Once entering a defensive state, it becomes even more impossible for them to develop empathy to feel the victim's pain. The punitive mechanism of the judiciary invisibly cuts off the possibility of sincere remorse and repair on the part of the perpetrator.

On-site Q&A and Extended Discussion

A participant raised a question: In the #MeToo movement, the public often emphasizes a "shame shift," hoping to return and redirect the sense of shame previously borne solely by the victim back onto the perpetrator. However, if a perpetrator experiences intense social shame and collective condemnation, might this instead provoke stronger defensive mechanisms, making them more inclined to hide and deny things more forcefully, thereby driving them further away from "empathy and admitting fault"?

Jen-Yu Peng responded: This question strikes straight at the core. The "shame shift" for victims is extremely crucial because, within the trauma of sexual violence, the most corrosive emotion is often the shame and guilt that seeps into the victim's soul. It is clearly the perpetrator who did wrong, yet the victim has been bearing this suffering.

Nevertheless, when society initiates collective condemnation or even "animalizes" and "bestializes" perpetrators (using descriptions like "wolf-teachers" or "beast-fathers"), it indeed triggers extreme defense in perpetrators. But this does not mean perpetrators should be spared from bearing shame; rather, we need to think about "how to create an environment where they are willing to take responsibility back."

If the environment is isolating and society seeks to completely destroy them and impose a social death sentence, perpetrators will inevitably counterattack and deny everything to the end. Shame and guilt must have an "end point," and we should let perpetrators know: you feel this pain and bear this shame in order to think about how to repair the harm you caused; once you grow the capacity to respect others and complete the repair, this community will still accept you as a member of human society. Lacking this reflective process accompanied by companions, and relying solely on blind condemnation, ultimately amounts to nothing more than a venting of revenge and cannot foster genuine change.

Another question noted that in practice, some sexual violence incidents are classified as "private disputes" (such as the McDonald's incident, or certain workplace/campus sexual harassment cases), while others become fully publicized because they involve public figures (such as the Mickey Huang case). When incidents enter the public eye, the public often expects to see severe punishment and impeachment. Amidst such high-profile public discussions, how should we balance "punishment" and "trauma repair"? How can legal reform or civil society organizations guide the public to understand this complexity?

Jen-Yu Peng responded: When an incident involves large-scale institutional exploitation (such as Mickey Huang's alleged purchase and participation in a transnational network of underage sexual exploitation imagery), this is definitely a serious public incident, not a private dispute.

Unfortunately, when facing such public incidents, our society often lacks the capacity for complex thinking. Taking the Mickey Huang case as an example, when he initially attempted to hint at his childhood trauma and twisted upbringing, public opinion quickly split into two extremes: one side showed blind sympathy and tolerance, while the other erupted into total anger, simplifying his behavior into an unforgivable perversion. Consequently, society missed the opportunity to deeply understand "how a perpetrator is shaped" and "the structural system of society consuming sexual exploitation imagery."

The current system (such as domestic violence prevention centers) often treats social workers as "case managers" forced to handle fifty or sixty cases each person, busy every day merely making phone calls, filling out forms, and running procedures. This completely depreciates and exploits the time and effort required for "building relationships and deep healing."

Healing and repair require a diverse and gradual process; they cannot be resolved instantly like ordering set meals at McDonald's by choosing Set A (judicial conviction) or Set B (psychological counseling). Just as when Taiwan confronts historical traumas such as the White Terror, our bureaucratic system often lacks imagination, fears being held accountable, and attempts to respond with the simplest methods of "locking people away" or "isolating them from society."

To create a genuine healing space, strength must often grow organically out of communities and daily life. We need to allow more organic and even unconventional interpersonal connections to emerge (for example, some local revitalization groups in Taichung invite the homeless to participate in concerts or winemaking activities, creating non-traditional support networks). Only when the general public is willing to cultivate spaces that accommodate complex life stories, rather than placing all expectations on simple criminal punishment, can victims find a true opportunity for respite and rebirth through human companionship and witnessing.