Senate bill to criminalize necrophilia

Anyone who sexually abuses a living person has at least a chance of being punished as the law provides for it. However, if that someone were to do it to the dead, he will probably get away with it.

Two senators have filed separate bills criminalizing necrophilia to plug this apparent loophole in the country’s criminal justice system.

The condition is characterized by a “morbid desire to have sexual contact with a dead body, usually of men to perform a sexual act with a dead woman,” according to Mosby’s Medical Dictionary.

Sen. Manuel Villar said the “forcible imposition of manhood … directed against a lifeless female does not make the grisly act any less detestable and heinous.”

“In fact, this vicious bestiality is notoriously offensive and revolting to the feelings of the living even as it grossly desecrates the dead,” he said in explanatory note to his Senate Bill 1297.

Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, who filed SB 505, noted that under the present Revised Penal Code, “only defamation to blacken the memory of one who is dead is criminalized.”

The two bills seek to amend the Revised Penal Code and introduce a provision against necrophilia.

The Villar bill imposes a jail term of 40 years or more on top of a fine of between P100,000 and P500,000. Estrada’s bill seeks the same fine but involves a lighter jail term of between six years and 20 years.

Under Estrada’s SB 505, sexual acts with a corpse cover “sexual intercourse, anal and/or oral sex.”

The Senate committee on justice and human rights conducted a preliminary hearing on the bills last month. Sen. Francis Escudero, the committee chair, acknowledged the absence of penalties against necrophilia under existing laws.

He said this was also probably the reason why no such cases have been found to have been reported to the Philippine National Police or the National Bureau of Investigation.