Against the backdrop of rising violence against women and children, it has become fashionable and expedient to ride on public outrage, come down very hard on criminals and make severer their punishment by law.

Though this is a politically correct stance, one questions whether serious sexual crimes today are indeed attributable to inadequacies of existing rape related laws and not other factors and that increasing the punishment will prove a panacea of this social ill. Is there any empirical proof of this?

I agree with what Women's Aid Organisation executive director Ivy Josiah who said: "redefining 'rape' does not address the limitations of the legal system, weak investigative procedures and the lack of support given to rape survivors" (' Women's groups laud rape definition review ') .

Widening the definition of rape and imposing the death penalty will score political points, but will it deter rising incidences of crime and sexual violence when their root social and cultural causes are not addressed?

As a start, has there been any public study made to profile the rapists before we jump the gun to blame existing laws as not being deterrent enough?

There is a danger when in the midst of public outrage the authorities find it expedient to simply broaden definition of rape to cover forced oral sex and use of objects. Such a move makes no attempt to distinguish between various forms of sexual assault in terms of gravity, consequences and proportion in terms of punishment.

Traditionally, there has always been a reason why rape was defined as requiring forced penile penetration.

While all forms of sexual assault on women are abhorred, criminalised and punished, the reason why rape, as traditionally defined, is, in terms of degree, particularly heinous and deserves the harshest of punishment is because it entails the possibility of the female victim being forcibly impregnated by her attacker.

Such a contingency will place her in moral dilemma of having to either abort the child that half belongs to her or to keep it in adulteration of her gene pool and constant reminder of her violation by the biological father.

This is the nature of the cruel dilemma by which a female suffers as a result from forced copulation. Should other forms of sexual assault be equated with rape by penile penetration? In terms of suffering and harm, is this the same as, for examples being penetrated by a finger, tongue, pencil or straw? I venture to suggest that it is absurd to view them as the same.

Granted that all forms of assault dehumanise the victim and deserve punishment, but does rape by penile penetration carry however the same consequences as (say) forced sodomy (anal penetration) of a woman victim?

Even if so, will forced sodomy (fingering or penetration by pencil) of a man (instead of a woman) qualify equally as rape irrespective whether perpetrator is male or female?

If rape is widened beyond forced penetration of the female sexual genitalia to that of the other orifices of mouth (as in oral sex) and anus/rectum (in case of sodomy), what about other violation of orifices of nose and ears?

One may also ask, what is so particularly significant about penetration of bodily orifices? Why not widen definition of rape to forced groping, fondling caressing or even kissing as well? Punish all of them by 20 years maximum jail! Do not these equally violate bodily integrity of women victims and in some cases inflict irreparable emotional trauma amongst the young and weak?

It is not intended here to bandy around with semantics but to highlight the necessity and practicality to draw a line so that we will not end up slipping down the slippery slope of treating every form of sexual assault as the same as rape (traditionally defined) without considering the differences in degree of punishment in proportion to the nature of harm inflicted.

Any society that pretends to be civilised cannot take the easy way out of just meting out equal severe punishment in respect of different types of sexual assaults of different severity and consequences in order just so to be politically correct and appease those whose political agenda is to champion the interest of a particular constituency at the expense of broader issues of justice and good sense in administration of the law.

One also notes that Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Dr Rais Yatim had proposed to the cabinet to impose the death penalty for cases of rape where death results from rape, no matter that the perpetrator having not the original criminal intention to cause the victim's death.

We all know that if we accidentally kill a person, we are not guilty of murder deserving of the death penalty because there was no criminal intention to kill the person. We also know that if we rape a woman we will be severely punished for rape but we will not deserve the death penalty as we are not murderers though rapists we may well be.

However, according to Rais, if we commit rape that accidentally results in death, than our status changes from rapist to murderer punishable by death even if there was no original intention to kill.

Yes, Rais' proposal is popular in the wake of public outrage of the rape/murder of 10-year-old children it assuages our primordial instinct to inflict revenge against the perpetrator viewed as a beast. But is it logical to take away the element of criminal intention as basis of culpability deserving of the ultimate penalty of death?

That there must be the element of criminal intention to kill is fundamental in jurisprudence of criminal laws in all civilised common law jurisdictions. It should not be so easily discarded just to appease a surge of public outrage. Otherwise, will it not be conveniently extended to cases where for example a rapist, not knowing that he has HIV, unwittingly passes the virus to the victim that subsequently dies?

Or what about a rape victim who commits suicide out of trauma and humiliation a week after the attack will it be attributable to the acts of the rapist? Will the offender in both such cases be said to have caused death and deserving of the death penalty?

If the death penalty has not so far proven very successful deterrent against drug trafficking what is the basis to surmise that it will be effective against the rising wave of crimes especially sexual crimes?

The above observations are made, not to trivialise the gravity of sexual offences against persons especially women and children, but to pause and caution whether we are not indeed taking the more expedient course rather than really identifying and grappling with underlying causes which may be politically inexpedient to address.

In the latter case, we would have gotten ourselves enmeshed in logical dilemmas of treating as the same penile, anal, finger and object penetration of all kinds of bodily orifices without differentiation. In blaming the rising crime incidences to inadequacies of existing rape-related laws, we may be taking the expedient way out of not confronting hard issues on the root causes of rising violent sexual crimes.

We would have brutalised ourselves in the process by extending capital punishment to a wider range of deviant behaviour without exorcising at the same time the spectre of rising crime and diminishing public safety.