The one of the strongest and clearest impact of the Lay Judge System in Japan has been seen in sex crime lay judge trials. Since the introduction of the system, sentencing for sex crime has been increasing. It seems that there has been a great “gap” between what lay people think is the proper sentence for sex offenders and the opinions of professional judges. Also, there are new challenges for victims of sex crime as they now have to be faced with lay people who may be acquaintances of victims. In this paper, I analyze various issues in sex crime lay judge trials. Those are, how and why impacts on sentencing has been seen, victims issues, whether sex crimes should not be tried by lay judge trials, and gender issues of lay judges. In order to do so, I used the data I had collected on the lay judge trials for sex crime cases (n=205) over a 2 year period since the system launched. It seems that many of challenging issues of the Lay Judge System are condensed and strongly seen in sex crime lay judge trials, so it can be said that sex crime trials are one of the most controversial areas of the System. The goal of my research is to reveal impacts, present issues and future prospect of the System through reviewing those 205 sex crime lay judge trials.

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The situation regarding victims of sexual violence has dramatically changed in this decade in Japan. Mainly women activists who addressed the issue of victim's rights of sexual violence have made this change. The number of victims who seek legal remedies has increased. This movement has made it clear that our legal system has not worked well for giving them appropriate remedies.
In the field of criminal law, rape is still determined under the influence of the patriarchal ideology. For example, rape is determined whether a victim made utmost resist against her offender. This way of determination can release rapists who know the victims, because in those cases it is more difficult for them to resist strongly. In addition, it is not likely for the victims of non-stranger rape to report the rape to the police. Victims still have faced the victim-blaming attitude of the society as a whole as well as a legal system itself. The above mentioned problem of the criminal law has also been seen in civil cases in which victims are demanding compensations from offenders. This happened particularly in sexual harassment lawsuits. The cases in which plaintiffs were defeated were determined by judges who relied on so called rape myth. Another problem of the civil cases is low amount of compensation, even though in some cases we can see relatively high amount of it.
The root cause of the problem is that there is merely education of sexual discrimination in the legal department of universities and the Legal Research and Training Institute run by the Supreme Court. The change of the issue of women's rights, which happened internationally in this decade, has not yet reached those educational bodies for lawyers.

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Lynchings and race riots symbolize the most offensive and tragic aspect of racism in the American South at the turn of the 20th century. Many historians and sociologists have researched the motivations behind lynching in American history and discovered complicated political, social and economic contexts for this phenomenon. Yet, however significant these contributions may be toward deepening our understanding of lynching, they tend to focus excessively on the cause of lynching, thereby ignoring the truly unique characteristics of lynching.
This essay pays less attention to the causes of lynching than to the effects of the actions of lynchers and the discourses produced by those who justified lynching of black people. In casting light on the Black Rapist Myth, in which black men were considered to be growing more brutally lustful toward white women and more inclined to rape them, we can discover complex effects of lynching practices in terms of gender, sexuality, race and class.
The Black Rapist discourse functioned in four ways: to justify disenfranchisement of African- American citizens; to terrorize and drive a dividing wedge into the solidarity of the Black community; to elevate white women onto the pedestal of "white chastity and purity," thereby containing them within the regime of white patriarchal supremacy; and to undermine interracially cooperative political and social movements such as the Readjusters, the Greenback-Labor Party, the Knights of Labor and the Populists.
The discourse of the Black Rapist and lynching suggests that gender and sexuality historically interact with other socially constructed categories such as race and class. Further, the Black Rapist Myth implies that gender and sexuality are truly constitutive of racial formations in American history.

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According to the judgments, when the trespassing (Article 130) was applied, 96% of the cases were also applied to other crimes. The other crimes were 62% for felonious offenses, and 31% for larceny offenses. And 78% of these crimes committed at houses. Regarding felonious offenses, at detached houses or row houses, the rate of robbery causing injury or death (Article 240) were high among robbery. At apartment houses, robbery (Article 236, Article 240, Article 241) and rape (Article 177, Article 181 (2)) accounted for the majority. And the rate of rape by robbery (Article 241) was the highest among robbery.

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There are various implications which included in making women's experiences in sexual violence to be social issue. First, it includes violence of human rights of women. Secondly, it means gender motivated violence, and thirdly it justifies the victim's rights to restore the human dignity and independence. Therefore there should be created criminal justice system for protecting women from sexual violence as well as reform of rape law into which reflects the reality of victim's situation. At the same time, the attitude of jurisprudence should be more gender sensitive.

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