Average sentences for Hong Kong’s gravest child sex crimes have remained below 10 years over the past three decades, far below the maximum penalty of life imprisonment, prompting a call for a sentencing council to issue clearer judicial guidance.

Citing data from 401 publicly available judgments between 1990 and 2025, University of Hong Kong law professor Puja Kapai on Tuesday said her research found six offences – including rape, buggery, and unlawful sexual intercourse – carried average prison terms ranging from four years and six months to nine years and eight months.

Kapai and her team also found that four of the six gravest sexual offences involving children showed a downward trend. This trend was especially pronounced for unlawful intercourse with a girl under 13, where average sentences fell from 10 to 12 years in the mid-2000s to under five years in recent years.

While acknowledging that judges were bound by precedent and had already taken a range of factors into account, the report found that sentences for the six offences “consistently fell in the low to medium range, far below the statutory maximum”.

Under Hong Kong’s common law system, appellate judgments provide sentencing guidance, setting starting points that judges may adjust upwards or downwards after considering aggravating and mitigating factors.

The associate professor remarked that while lower sentences were not a matter of judicial bias, “I would say that it’s fair to describe the attitude as fairly conservative”. She said judicial officers were not obliged to adopt a “trauma-informed approach,” which should include not only the assault itself but also the mental burden of navigating court proceedings.

The report did not include all cases of sexual offences involving children as it only included judgments in the public record and excluded cases resolved through guilty pleas and other procedures.

Kapai’s team singled out six sexual offences involving children that warrant the maximum penalty of life imprisonment under the Crime Ordinance: incest by men, rape, non-consensual buggery, homosexual buggery with or by a man under 16, buggery with girl under 21, and intercourse with girl under 13.

Rape and non-consensual buggery carried average prison terms of 9.8 and 9.5 years respectively, according to the report. They were also the crimes that had shown rare spikes and “comparatively harsher” penalties within the period.

Describing a sentencing council as a “support aid” to the judicial system, Kapai said such a body could help establish more “principled, transparent and consistently applied” sentencing guidelines for these crimes.

In the United Kingdom, for example, an independent public body called the Sentencing Council develops guidelines, monitors their implementation and evaluates the impact of potential penalties on victims.

Kapai said Hong Kong lacked an equivalent body, leaving victims facing uncertainty even after perpetrators were convicted. She added that judgments rarely explained clearly how various factors shaped the final sentence.

“Recognising that a lack of certainty, inconsistency, or even perceptions around inconsistency, can be damaging to criminal justice outcomes as public interest,” she said.

If guidelines were in place, complainants would have a clearer sense of the likely penalties perpetrators could face if they decided to file a complaint and pursue legal proceedings, she added.