HONG KONG – NGO worker Jessie recalled freezing in panic when she said she was sexually assaulted by an acquaintance one summer, unable to resist while he proceeded without her consent.

Years later, she testified against him, but rather than feeling empowered, she felt “oppressed and helpless” as she watched the man walk free under decades-old laws Hong Kong is now seeking to overhaul.

“The defence lawyer asked: ‘Why didn’t you fight back at the time, bite or hit him?’” she told AFP, adding that the court failed to consider she had been unable to resist the assault due to fear.

The judge ruled the defendant may have “honestly but mistakenly believed” that she consented. He was acquitted despite never testifying.

“I never realised our laws were so backwards,” said Jessie, who is in her 30s.

In many countries, “mistaken belief” and “implied consent” – whereby permission is not expressly granted through words or writing but implicitly through actions or circumstances – are not legally valid defences in sexual offence trials.

Hong Kong’s decades-old sexual offence laws, however, are not as stringent, opening the door to verdicts like Jessie’s.

The Chinese finance hub has sought to overhaul those laws, opening sweeping reforms to public consultation this month.

The long-awaited reforms will introduce stricter penalties for sexual crimes, but Jessie and other survivors say the changes still do not bar the defence of “mistaken belief”.

Reforms should “take into account victim-survivors’ traumatic reactions”, Florence Tsang, a trauma counsellor at the sexual violence crisis centre RainLily,...