Determining punishment in light of victim characteristics and actions, with an emphasis on gender: comparative view of the laws of England

Abstract

The legislative principles to which a judge must pay attention in determining the Ta'ziri (discretionary) penalty are included in the four clauses that have been proposed in Article 18 of the Islamic Penal Code. These four clauses are: a) the perpetrator's motive and psychological state; b) the ways of committing the crime; c) the perpetrator's actions after committing the crime, and; d) the personal background. In such a view, the victim has no place and, therefore, no effect of his intervention is seen. The victim status, by emphasis on gender, is the objective that the present work intends to examine with a descriptive-analytical method. For this research purpose in a comparative look, the laws of Iran and England have been studied. It is concluded that, what can be extracted from the criminal laws of Iran and England is that, in the field of substantive laws, the legislators of these countries, while accepting the vulnerability of women in crimes in general, have tried to criminalize some behaviors and actions that cannot be considered as assaults, in the general conditions of protecting them.