tim's experiment

There has been much talk about the case of the accountant who had, through use of the internet and generous dollops of money, worked his way through 100 sexual encounters with a variety of ladies, all of them much younger than he was.  This estimate has to be treated with some caution because it came from a policeman outside the court. It is funny how the police have a policy that they will not comment on individual cases … except when they want to comment on an individual case. There has been some talk of the accountant being defrocked (or whatever it is they do to accountants) when he emerges from his four years and eight months of correctional servitude.

This would be a mistake. This man has done more for the reputation of accountancy than all those implausible commercials in which a CPA was depicted as a sort of financial SAS man, bringing down evil-doers with his calculator. Nobody bought that stuff. We all continued to think that accountants were wimpy nerds, spending their working lives crouched Cratchit-like over ledgers, and their leisure in conventional congress with their lawfully wedded wives. Clearly this profession has more going for it than meets the eye. I do not remember being so frisky at 61.

Of course there is a serious side to this. Many people in the puritanism and law-enforcement industries are worried about compensated dating. These worries are understandable. Compensated dating leads rather easily by degrees to compensated sex. And like all commerce these days, it is greatly facilitated by the internet. Some of the girls who were discussing the finer points of book-keeping with the defendant were illegally young. No doubt everyone concerned was lying about his or her age, but the law on this point does not admit ignorance as a defence.

However on one point the proceedings seem to have been rather unsatisfactory. The “internet predator” according to the Post, pleaded guilty to three counts of indecency, one of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under 16, two counts of buggery and one of attempted buggery. This was a disconcerting piece of court reporting because the offence of buggery was abolished in 1991. I record with some irritation that it took me hours to work out what had heppened. Buggery in general (the Common Law offence) did cease to be a crime in 1991. Sundry statutory restrictions on such activities remained in the Crimes Ordinance. Over the ensuing years these were struck down by the Judiciary as being inconsistent with the SAR’s obligation to treat people equally because in effect they discriminated against gay men. However one item has been left sitting in the Ordinance, sticking up like a nail house in a Beijing property development, because it does not concern gay men.

Section 118D makes it an offence, punishable by life imprisonment, for a man to do it with a woman under 21. This, I presume, was the provision that was wheeled out against our luckless accountant. Apparently only two of the alleged 100 sexual partners were prepared to appear in court as prosecution witnesses. Bringing in the buggery items gave the prosecution more bang for its buck, if you’ll pardon the expression in this context.

This is deplorable. Section 118D may have looked a sensible gloss on the law when buggery anywhere, by anyone, was already illegal anyway. It now looks outstandingly stupid. If a couple, both 19 years old, do it together the woman has no problems but the man commits a serious offence. Even if they are married. No doubt in a year or two it will be enough to get him on a sex offenders’ register for life even if he is let off with a fine. To put it another way the ludicrous situation is that the legality of sex with girls of different ages varies depending on which orifice you use.

Perhaps I had better say at this point that I am personally among the many men who are not attracted by the idea of buggery, whether it is legal or not. I have, however, met ladies who claim to enjoy the subordinate role. One of them told me she achieved a sort of orgasm. So clearly there are couples who genuinely jointly wish to do this and a law which says that if they do it then the man is a criminal is silly.

It is, I suppose, possible that this law will eventually be found to be unconstitutional. I am not sure whether it discriminates against men because if two people do it together only the man is guilty, or whether it discriminates against women because, if you want to try it, you are going to have some trouble recruiting a partner until you reach the age of 21. But the law is obviously unsatisfactory. So in the meeantime it would be a good idea if prosecutors did not use it when there are other alternatives available, as there were in this case.

As far as compensated dating is concerned, I fear that the law is not going to be a great help. Faced with a social problem of this kind the reaction of the law and order interest tends to resemble that of the man with a hammer to whom all problems looked like a nail. The law has never had much success in suppressing prostitution of other kinds and there is little hope of it succeeding here, where it only allows you to prosecute the occcasional customer who gets his age sums wrong. What is needed is a serious educational effort to persuade young women of the merits of inserting “no” at some point between the compensated lunch in the Mandarin coffee shop, and the compensated roll in the hay at a Kowloon Tong love hotel.

 But I am not optimistic. Where there are many poor women and a few exceedingly rich men you will usually find ladies who are prepared to undertake some freelance wealth redistribution. This problem is just another by-product of Hong Kong’s increasing resemblance to a banana republic.