Yurchenko R. Victimological prevention of violent sexual crimes

A comprehensive victimological study of violent sexual crimes in the frame of criminal offenses against sexual freedom and sexual integrity as a destructive social phenomenon has been carried out in the dissertation. A detailed criminological and victimological characterization of such socially dangerous acts has been proposed, also the system of measures and means of victimological prevention has been developed on this basis. It is indicated that violent sexual crimes should be understood as actions that encroach on the sexual freedom and sexual integrity of the victim by causing her\him physical and/or mental violence, imply the occurrence of serious and especially severe consequences for the life, health, honor and dignity of a person, and also make it difficult/impossible to fulfill the assigned social role in society. Taking into account the features given in the definition, the types of sexual criminal offenses that can be considered violent are qualified as: rape (Article 152 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine); sexual violence (Article 153 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) and coercion into sexual intercourse (Article 154 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine). It has been established that victimological prevention of violent sexual crimes involves the use of general-social, special - victimological and individual preventive means and measures of influence on the victim of such socially dangerous acts. It is noted that such levels are interdependent and must be implemented simultaneously with the criminological prevention of socially dangerous behavior of a criminal offender. It was determined that social victimological preventive measures should be differentiated into socio-economic, regulatory-legal, cultural and educational. The main ones from the above list are regulatory and legal measures, which include: 1) improving criminal legislation, in particular in terms of normalizing the concept and general content of sexual violence and its typical forms; 2) bringing criminal legislation into compliance with the requirements of international humanitarian law in order to simplify the process of bringing military personal of the aggressor country to criminal responsibility for violent sexual crimes; 3) improving interpretation of Art. 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (violation of the laws and customs of war) in order to simplify the understanding of how to qualify a criminal offense peculiarities by pre-trial investigation bodies; 4) introducing changes to the criminal legislation in terms of supplementing the Criminal Code of Ukraine with a section devoted to criminal offenses against humanity.