Assault on equality: China's obsolete legal culture exposed

Is raping a bar girl less harmful than assaulting a "good" girl? A legal scholar at one of Beijing's elite universities says the answer is yes.

And for all the media and online outcry his comments triggered, it seems Professor Yi Yanyou is not alone in advocating an obsolete legal culture in which women are not necessarily equal before the law.

Injustice in the mainland's judicial system has returned to the spotlight following several highly publicised cases of sexual violence in which online commenters have argued that the perpetrators got off too lightly.

Yi, a professor of law at Tsinghua University, found himself at the heart of the controversy when he sparked outrage with a Weibo comment last week, in which he said raping a "bar girl", prostitute or escort was less serious than raping a "good" girl.

His comments came in a reference to a recent high-profile case in which Li Tianyi, son of a well-known People's Liberation Army singer, was accused of raping a woman he said was a cocktail waitress, paid to spend time with male clients.

Yi tried in vain to quell the online outcry by clarifying that he was not saying it was acceptable to rape a prostitute, but that the psychological harm would be lower for a sex worker than for a chaste girl.

While Yi succumbed to the pressure and deleted his comments, experts say his remarks exposed an attitude that is widely held.