Paper Title
Offenses Of Rape: A Comparative Study Between The Previous Criminal Law And Criminal Law�s Amendment

Abstract
The offense of rape is one of serious crime types, which affects social morality and also affects the religious beliefs with the explicit prohibition regarding sexual misconduct. In addition, the victim from the offense of rape would receive severe effect towards both physical and mental health, deterioration of fame, reputation, and did not dare to return to normal life in the society. Therefore, the criminal law related to offense of rape is updated constantly in order to cover all aspects, to be modernized, to catch up with all situations, and to meet with social conditions and human behavior that are changed in each period of time. The latest amendment on the Criminal Code was in 2007, and three main aspects were amended. First aspect was to expand the scope of the offense of rape out extensively in the Criminal Code, and the word "rape" is defined in writing. Next aspect amended in the Criminal Code specified that a husband who raped his wife conducted offensive, and this aspect had never been appeared in the previous criminal code. This represents a change to the previous thought that women are obliged to allow her husband to have sex with her every time, depending on the requirements. The last aspect amended in the Criminal Code specified that all types of genders can be offender and victim in the offense of rape, and it differs from the previous version that it specified only male as an offender and female as a victim. Therefore, this research has an objective to change the concepts and elements of the offense of rape that has been newly improved by comparing with the offense of rape from previous version and guidelines on the interpretation of enforcement, and propose ways to improve and amend the law to be appropriate with Thai society as well as the enforcement of such law in the future. Keywords: Offense of Rape, Criminal Code, Interpretation