Latest Updates: child abuse RSS

  • thabet 12:29 pm on February 10, 2010 | 5 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , child abuse, , , , social power,

    Imam from east London mosque is jailed for beating a nine-year-old boy:

    A RELIGIOUS leader has been jailed for punching and kicking a nine-year-old boy, then beating him with a bamboo stick.

    Gulam Hussain, 44, of Knotts Green Road, in Leyton, was jailed for 12 weeks today at Walthamstow Magistrates’ Court after pleading guilty to common assault by beating.

    The court heard that Hussain, who was an Imam at The Jamia Mosque in Lea Bridge Road, Leyton, had previously been cautioned in 2005 for a charge of actual bodily harm (ABH) against an 11-year-old.

    Chair magistrate Dr Paul Davis told Hussain through an Urdu interpreter that he was being jailed, “for the protection of the public”.

    This mosque has shall we say a ‘colourful’ history to anyone who grew up in the area. Wouldn’t surprise me if accusations of dirty dealings between the boys parents and people keen to take charge of the mosque committee emerge, such as those which have surfaced on a forum frequented by British Muslims. But whatever the truth of these accusations, this doesn’t excuse the teacher for abusing his power over the children.

     

  • johnpi 4:14 am on February 9, 2010 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, , , , , , ,

    Hijaabified Beauty takes on child abuse in the Muslim community:

    A while ago, I wrote a very personal post which was deleted very soon after I published it. You see, I have a dark secret that I have kept to myself for much of my life. A secret that I wish I had the courage to share with someone close to me. One that has, in my mind robbed me of the innocence of childhood. I was a victim of sexual abuse.

    I am not writing this post to gain some sort of pity, or to be encouraged by my readers to tell someone I know, or even to confront my abusers. I am writing this post to alert parents. Most instances of child molestation are committed by individuals that are close to the child or family. The offender is often a family member…someone who has easy access to the child, and someone who the child is relatively comfortable around. Unfortunately, this was true in my case.

    It pains me to say this, but parents need to stop being so trusting of their relatives. It is important that if you leave your child home with a relative that you ask your child what they did with their uncle (for example). Children are innocent, they will tell you. I wish till this day that my mother would have forsaken all political correctness and politeness and that she had explained to me what a good touch and bad touch was so that I might have been able to salvage my childhood.
    ….

    And don’t for a second think that we are free from such a fitna because we are Muslim. Child molestation is big problem in our communities…it just doesn’t get talked about. I want to change that. Start talking…to your child, your neighbor, a family member, your shaykh or community member. Make the community aware of this horrible problem.

     

  • johnpi 3:34 pm on December 26, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, , , , ,

    A Pakistani imam has been given the death sentence for raping and murdering a 13-year-old boy.

    He killed the child to conceal his sin and threw the body in fields near the mosque.

    Odds are this was only the last of many children this man molested. This is why Muslims who report Muslim leaders engaged in sexual abuse are the best defenders of the ummah. As was noted in a case earlier this year in America:

    The father knows that many Muslims would have kept this matter private.

    He could have quietly moved his family to another mosque and left Shahade behind.

    “Some people feel that airing your dirty laundry, the shame comes on you. No. Our family does not feel shame,” he said. “If we had let him go, he would’ve done it to somebody else.”

     

  • johnpi 8:44 am on December 22, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, , , , state taking children

    Muslim community groups support Sacramento-area family that is pleading to get its children back from Child Protective Services.

    “I just want my kids back. That’s all I want. Those kids are my life,” sobbed Sacramento mom, Fakhere Afzal.

    And that life changed forever for Fakhere Afzal, more than a year-and-a-half ago, when CPS took way her two daughters ages two months old and 15 months old at the time.

    “This is my very humble request… to the CPS and everybody who enrolled in this case with us. Please, we just want our kids back,” Afzal pleaded.

    For the father, Chaudhry Sheriff, the separation likely hits him a bit harder. Authorities believe he broke his 2-month-old daughter’s arm. It was in July of last year, when Chaudhry brought his baby to the ER when she wouldn’t stop crying. Cops came to investigate and later arrested him for abuse.

    “We… we (are) dead, without kids. I know we did not do anything. Why they’re doing this?” the father asked.

    The parents say they have followed all the rules, completed parenting classes required by CPS, and have no history of abuse. Still the courts have ended their visitation rights.
    ….

    Local Muslims are urging CPS to reunite the family.

    “On behalf of the Muslim and Pakistani community to resolve this very long, outstanding issue,” said Sarfraz Khan, chairman of the Friends of Pakistan.

    The family has turned to doctors to conduct an outside investigation. They determined the baby suffered injuries during the birthing process which involved a vacuum-assisted C-section. The infant also had a vitamin deficiency which could have affected the fracture.

     

  • johnpi 2:29 pm on December 13, 2009 | 6 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, , , , Kerenina Sunny Halim, Miss World contest, religious protitutes, ,

    A scandal has broken out at the Miss World contest, where Miss Indonesia has been exposed as a member of a Christian cult called The Family International that until 1986 was known for including its children in sexual activity.

    The group was also known for a form of evangelistic religious prostitution that its members called ‘flirty fishing.’

    The group claimed that the purposes of Flirty Fishing were for women to show God’s love to men, to win converts to the group, and to garner material and financial support for the group. As cult members usually live in communes, travel a lot and spend their time proselytizing rather than earning a regular income, the financial aspect soon became dominant. The cult also used Flirty Fishing to curry favours with local men of influence such as business men, politicians or police.

    Rick Ross’s Cultwatch has more. The only quote you need to hear is the one that echoes the timeless refrain about religious extremists:

    The official Family position is that a few individuals misused their authority and misapplied the law of love.

    Or as one brother said to another about the Taliban:

    Brother, don’t know you know they were merely misguided?

    The Miss World contest is not allowing Miss Indonesia, Kerenina Sunny Halim, to talk to the media.

     

  • johnpi 8:07 am on October 30, 2009 | 4 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , child abuse, , , , , ,

    A Pennsylvania judge has erased more than 6,000 juvenile court convictions in that state arising from a pair of corrupt judges who took kickbacks to convict more children of crimes so the private corporation jailer could increase profits by warehousing the convicted children in its jail.

    The story was featured prominently in Michael Moore’s new documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story,” as a paradigm example of what happens when government functions are privatized.

    Moore concluded that ‘capitalism is evil.’

     

  • johnpi 11:06 pm on October 28, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , child abuse, , , ,

    Photobucket

    Last Fall, a 10-year-old Moroccan girl named Zaineb Chtit (Zaineb is spelled Zineb in many of these stories) who had been contracted as a domestic servant to an affluent Moroccan family by her impoverished parents was hospitalized. Her injuries, inflicted by her employer, were described:

    Zainab looked emaciated. Her body was bruised and bleeding from beatings. She was branded on her lips with a red-hot iron. She was burned with boiling oil on her chest and private areas.

    She was also illiterate, having never attended school, and had been locked in a cellar while not working. Moroccan bloggers highlighted her story and the fact that Morocco has 177,000 child workers, 66,000 of whom work as domestic servants, many of them girls.

    Last week, Zaineb’s attacker Nawal Houmin, the wife of the couple who had hired her, was sentenced to three years in prison without possibility of parole and a $13,000 fine.

    Human rights groups have complained that the sentence is too lenient, but a local blogger reports that most people in the community were shocked, expecting that there would not be a penalty of more than a few months, given it was a prominent local family, and the husband is a judge.

    Moroccan bloggers are now advocating for a campaign to address the problem of child labor at its roots with more resource put toward social aid and subsidized tuition and school supplies for poor children, as well as more substantial enforcement of child labor laws in that country.

     

  • johnpi 8:10 am on October 16, 2009 | 69 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, ,

    Miracle baby under ’round-the-clock guard’ in Dagestan.

    Photobucket

    Quotations from Quran start appearing on the body of a 9-month boy named Ali from Kizlyar, Dagestan, his parents claim.

    Birthmarks in form of Arabic scripts have been appearing on the baby’s body since his birth. First, there were individual letters, then texts and, according to local imams, these are texts from the Quran, the Vesti TV has reported on Thursday.

    Thus, one of the baby’s legs has an inscription, “Allah is the creator of all things.”

    “First, there was a hematoma on his chin. When the bruise went off, we saw the word “Allah,” Ali’s mother Madina Yakubova said.

    Words similar to birthmarks show up on his shank and ankle usually on Monday and Friday and then disappear.

    When new inscriptions are appearing, Ali doesn’t sleep all night long and has high temperature and even strong drugs cannot send it off.
    ….

    Hundreds of Dagestan Muslims come to Ali’s house as pilgrims. Local authorities, beware of the rush, decided to guard the house round-the-clock.

    Also tagging this ‘child abuse’ in the event (likelihood) of parental fakery.

     

  • johnpi 8:57 pm on October 12, 2009 | 4 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , child abuse, , ,

    Rates of sexual abuse of India’s children shockingly high.

    Despite a few films, some books, more studies and innumerable news reports on the controversial and shrouded issue of incest and child abuse, it is only the devastating statistics that tell the true horror of what children in India face on a daily basis. With sex trafficking being a profitable business, sexual abuse in the country is as rampant among boys as it is among girls.

    According to the linked report, 53 percent of Indian children face one or more forms of sexual abuse, of which 50 percent is perpetrated by people they know. The author belabors the fact that it is not a social, cultural or class-specific issue. I infer that means it is not an issue that belongs to any one religious community either.

    There are 150 million Muslims in India. Assuming these abuse figures are static in recent history, about 75 million Muslims are walking around India today as child sexual abuse victims and survivors.

    Is there any reason to doubt that child sexual abuse statistics are not equally high in other South Asian nations such as Bangladesh and Pakistan?

     

  • johnpi 5:37 am on October 8, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, children removed from Muslim homes, ,

    Seattle police remove Muslim children from home of alleged child molester, then return them after community protests.

    Seven Muslim children who were removed from their home by Child Protective Services (CPS) last week, while police investigated molestation allegations against their mother’s common-law husband, will be returned to their home, a King County Juvenile Court judge ruled on Wednesday.

    Before his ruling, Judge Ronald Kessler issued an order of protection restricting the man from entering the family home or contacting the children. He asked for assurances from the children’s mother, Ethiopian refugee Asha Gobana, that she would respect the restraining order even if it went against her husband’s wishes.
    ….

    The children’s removal sparked outrage among members of the East African Muslim community, who staged an all-day protest on Friday at one of the state’s Department of Social and Health Services offices in South Seattle. Many also attended Wednesday’s Juvenile Court hearing.

    The protesters expressed concern that the children would be placed in non-Muslim foster homes where their religious culture and dietary restrictions would not be observed.

    The family children are not suspected to be targets of the man’s molestation.

     

  • johnpi 5:28 am on September 21, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Afghan police, child abuse, , ,

    NATO forces suppress reports of Afghan soldiers raping young boys.

    Army staff and National Defence headquarters officials were told in 2007 that young boys had allegedly been sexually abused by Afghan security forces at a Canadian base in Afghanistan, but the concern at the time was that the incident might be reported in the news media, according to military records obtained by the Citizen.

    In addition, last year Brig.-Gen. J.C. Collin, commander of Land Force Central Area, passed on to the senior army leadership the concerns raised by military police who said they had been told by their commanders not to interfere in incidents in which Afghan forces were having sex with children.

     

  • johnpi 8:55 pm on June 10, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , child abuse,

    A report in Adnkronos says there is alarm in Algeria over an increase in child sexual abuse cases, but I suspect it is a more a matter of greater reporting of the problem due to greater awareness. If anything, the heightened awareness will tend to reduce the actual incidents of abuse, making Algeria safer for children.

     

  • johnpi 10:53 am on June 1, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, , family reputation,

    A story on in-family sexual abuse in the Arab News titled “When families fail them”:

    (More …)

     

  • thabet 5:52 am on May 26, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , child abuse, ,

    Father John Owen, a Catholic official in Cardiff, has said that most peadophilia is committed by homosexual men, and said that anyone who questioned these facts wanted nothing less than gay orgies in front of the Vatican.

     

  • thabet 4:02 am on May 23, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, , ,

    This fatwa at Islam QA is filed under the category ‘Psychological and Social Problems’.

    They forgot to add ‘The Causes of…’ to the front of the category heading.

    (Via Kawthar.)

     

  • thabet 8:45 am on May 20, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , child abuse, ,

    A nine-year inquiry has published its report into child abuse at Catholic-run homes released.

     

  • johnpi 3:07 pm on May 11, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, , , ,

    India, ahead of the rest of the world in one special metric.

    Around 1.2 million children are believed to be involved in prostitution in India, the country’s federal police said Monday.

    Ashwani Kumar, who heads the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), told a seminar on human trafficking, that India occupied a “unique position” as what he called a source, transit nation and destination of this trade.

    India’s home secretary Madhukar Gupta remarked that at least 100 million people were involved in human trafficking in India.

     

  • thabet 2:25 am on May 11, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, ,

    Orthodox Jewish community struggles with abuse allegations.

     

  • thabet 1:19 am on April 27, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , child abuse,

    A couple who severely abused their nine-year-old daughter were sentenced to 10 years in prison, in what has been described as a ‘landmark case’ in the UAE.

     

  • johnpi 7:48 am on April 20, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , child abuse, , , ,

    Saffiyah at Muslimah Media Watch explores the media coverage of the alleged slaying of a two-year-old child by a Muslimah who insisted that she be allowed to wear her hijab in her police mugshot. The request was denied and the distraught woman’s picture was released to the public. Much more coverage focused on the hijab than on the death of the child – a situation that was not helped by the many comments made by the woman’s husband defending her right to cover but failing to mention the death of the child. As Saffiyah concludes, “The real insult to the religion of Islam is the killing of a two year old, not the photograph of a suspected murderer sans hijab.” (Previous posting and discussion about this at Talk Islam here.)

     

  • Kawthar 12:39 am on April 16, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, , parenting

    French police detained a couple for depriving their eight children of food and physically abusing them. The parents explained that they were trying to raise their children in “strict obedience to Islam”

     

  • shahed 7:24 am on April 10, 2009 | 5 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , child abuse, , , ,

    Here’s an article about Islam being “insulted” by a mugshot (sans headscarf) of a woman arrested in Illinois. Muslim organizations (save for CAIR) were reluctant to comment, probably because the woman is accused of beating her 2-year old niece to death while in her care. (Nobody seems to want to comment on that aspect, either.)

     

  • razib, murtad fitri 5:45 pm on February 28, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse,

    from the GSS, if “The parents regularly beat the child,” the state should:
    WHITES:
    2.7 – take no action
    12.3 – give warning
    85.0 – take child

    BLACKS:
    6.3 – take no action
    37.9 – give warning
    55.8 – take child

     

  • abunoor 9:21 am on February 17, 2009 | 9 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse,

    Sister Umm Reem has begun a series of posts over at Muslim Matters on Sexual Abuse of children among Muslims.

    The first post is here.

    Surprised? Don’t be. I had a hard time believing it when I first encountered sisters in such situations. I thought that these heinous acts only happen in non-Muslim societies. How could Muslims do such a thing? But, I was oblivious of how widespread this evil was within my very own Muslim world, where Muslim men victimize their own blood relatives, especially the little timid girls among them. I tried to assure myself that mothers similar to the mother of the little girl whose story I just relayed, were rare. I definitely had a lot to learn.

    child-abuse

    The purpose of this series of articles is to advise Muslim parents around the world to be cautious, to offer help to the victims of this abuse, and to offer suggestions to the family members of those victims.

     

  • thabet 12:36 pm on December 10, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , child abuse, , ,

    A Wikipedia entry was banned for a couple of days in the UK; the ban has since been lifted.

     

  • thabet 8:16 pm on September 27, 2008 | 3 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, , ,

    The man who was found guilty of ordering two boys to engage in ritual flogging was handed a suspended jail sentence.

     

  • thabet 3:12 pm on August 27, 2008 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, , , , ,

    The man who forced two young boys to partake in a ritual flogging ceremony has been found guilty of child cruelty.

    The BBC has some background on the practice.

     

  • aziz 7:04 am on August 19, 2008 | 8 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, ,

    regarding the forced ritual flogging of young boys –

    the issue really serves to highlight the necessity of governmental oversight of religious practice. Not to define what religious practices are “correct” or not, but rather to simply be blind to religion when evaluating issues against the law. The question of whether self-flagellation is an authentic Islamic or Shi’a practice is a (bloody) red herring – the question is simply whether the actions violated Law. And they did, so Mr. Zaidi needs to be prosecuted accordingly. Bringing this issue into the domain of religious freedom only serves to cloud the issue, and taint the entire muslim community, Sunni and Shi’a alike.

    good discussion at Deenport, also, particularly this comment:

    apart from the (elected) government, who else can provide public safeguards when religious practices veer into problematic areas, for instance where they are forced upon those who are uncomfortable with them, or simply don’t accept them as ‘correct’ religious practices?

    I do believe that ultimately, these safeguards protect religious minorities even while they impose limits on public manifestations of religion. Do we need protecting from ourselves? I think that sometimes we do…

     

  • thabet 8:49 pm on August 18, 2008 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, , , , , , , ,

    The state’s need to define ‘religion’: The trial of a man who whipped himself during a ritual ceremony and then allegedly forced two teenage boys to do the same, has begun in Manchester.

     

  • thabet 8:39 am on August 8, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: child abuse, ,

    A rabbi who uncovers child abuse in strictly Orthodox communities says he feared for his life as he was chased by a group of 200 Charedi men in North London.

     

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