On the Criminal Responsibility of Buying Abducted Women or Children: The Human Dignity Perspective

Buying and selling abducted women or children are symmetrical crimes, but the “the same punishment for the same crime” is not applied. The focus of the criminal punishment for buying abducted women or children is not about increasing the statutory sentence, but strengthening judicial and law enforcement, to increase the prosecution rate and impose combined punishment for several crimes including the buying of abducted women or children and other subsequent crimes, so as to demonstrate the inevitability of criminal punishment. Human dignity is the core legal interest violated by the crime of buying abducted women or children. The specific legal interest is that humans are not for sale, which should be valued and protected independently in criminal law. This crime is a type of behavioral offense rather than a crime of circumstances. Under normal circumstances,neither the consent of the victim nor the goodwill of the purchaser excludes conviction of the crime. Compared with the crime of abducting and trafficking women or children, buying abducted women or children is not necessarily a serious crime, and the basic statutory punishment of less than three years is reasonable. However, it is possible to appropriately raise the sentence to less than five years in legislation.Where subsequent behaviors do not constitute a crime, they can be used as aggravating circumstances for the crime, and an aggravated statutory sentence can be configured to connect with the statutory punishments for the crime of abducting and trafficking women or children.