Relooking at Statutory Rape Laws in Malaysia: Psychosocial Characteristics of Sexual Relations among Underage and Adult-Child Partners, Sexual Motives and Perception of the Criminal Justice Personnel

Statutory rape laws are designed to protect children from the manipulation of adults into having sexual intercourse.

However, in Malaysia, statutory rape laws are applied even on male adolescents who are close in age with their female partners.

This is problematic because applying these laws into male children will criminalize their normative sexual behaviors which has long-lasting damaging effects.

In addition, the perception of the criminal justice personnel on sexual behaviors of children also cements the blanket applications of statutory rape laws onto every case involving female children.

To reform the use of statutory rape laws in Malaysia, data on the sexual relations between close-in-age partners and adult-child partners are needed. This study has three research objectives.

First, I aim to explore the perception of the criminal justice system personnel (i.e., prosecutors, police officers and probation officers) towards the implementation of statutory rape laws on adolescents in Malaysia.

Second, I would like to investigate the psychosocial characteristics (sexual and antisocial dimensions) of sexual relations involving two close-in-age children in comparison with sexual relations involving adults and children.

Lastly, I aim to explore the psychosocial-cultural motivations behind the pursuance of sexual relationships among Asian adolescents.

The design of the proposed study will be a mixed design, employing both quantitative (to achieve research objective 2) and qualitative (to achieve research objective 1 and 3).

For the quantitative part of the study, a hypothesis will be tested which is: Close-in-age sexual partners differ in terms of psychosocial characteristics compared to adult-child sexual partners. This will be tested using a binary logistic regression. Then, I will employ a thematic analysis to find out the patterns from the responses.

The findings of this project will be disseminated through two journal articles and a conference attendance.