Johan Hari has a must-read article about forced kidnap, mutilation and rape of women in Ethiopia, as practiced for generations – and changing now.
Latest Updates: rape RSS
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aziz
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johnpi
After a thorough investigation, the Dubai police have discovered that rape is bad for tourism.
A British woman who was jailed in Dubai and charged with having sex outside marriage after claiming that she had been raped while on holiday in the Gulf state has seen both charges dropped.
The charge of illegal sex against the 23-year-old woman and her partner, 44, was dropped by the Dubai public prosecutor after the couple produced a marriage certificate showing they had been married since November.
The woman originally claimed that she had been raped in the lavatories of a luxury Dubai hotel on New Year’s Eve after drinking heavily.
….The charge of rape against an Indian worker at the hotel has also been dropped after police found no evidence to back up the woman’s claim that he had followed her into the lavatories and attacked her while she was semi-conscious.
A statement released by Dubai authorities said that the public prosecution had closed the case against the Indian man “as the incident didn’t happen”.
The couple went to police on January 1 to report the attack but were arrested and jailed after the woman admitted under questioning that they had been sharing a hotel room and been drunk at the Address Hotel in the Dubai Marina district.
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johnpi
Bangladesh teenager receives 101 lashes for becoming pregnant
A 16-year-old Bangladeshi girl was who raped 8 months ago was given 101 lashes as punishment for having conceived during the assault, Bangladesh’s Daily Star reports. Meanwhile, the paper notes, the alleged rapist received no punishment.
The village elders who issued the fatwa against the girl also fined the girl’s father and warned him that his family would be forced into isolation if they didn’t pay.
According to the Telegraph, the girl was so ashamed that she did not lodge a complaint about her attack. Human rights activists say that she married quickly after the attack, but was divorced not long after when it was revealed she was pregnant. She told the Daily Star that the rapist had “spoiled” her life.
“I want justice,” she said.
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johnpi
The Sun reports that the cellmate of the girl believed the police were stricter with her because she was a Muslim of Pakistani descent:
“She’s a British girl but a Muslim, so I think they were tougher on her because of that.
“She was trying to report the rape but soon realized the policemen were more interested in how often she has sex with her boyfriend.
“They even asked if she did just normal sex or anything else in bed.”
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johnpi
Israeli study: Rape more traumatic than terrorism.
Victims of rape suffer from higher levels of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) than victims of war or terror, a new study reveals.
The research could bring about new approaches to the way rape victims in Israel are treated.
The study was carried out by Dr. Avigal Mor and Dr. Moshe Farchi from the Social Work department at the Tel Hai Academic College in northern Israel.
PTSD levels in different types of trauma victims were compared, including victims of rape, victims of war and terror, people hurt in traffic accidents, people diagnosed with severe diseases and people who lost someone dear to them.
The study found that victims of rape and sexual assault developed much higher levels of PTSD than other types of trauma.
Related to this.
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johnpi
The west African nation of Guinea, 85 percent Muslim, saw a savage attack on an opposition demonstration at a stadium where nearly 50,000 had gathered to protest the military government. Rape by groups of soldiers figured prominently in the violence.
157 were reported slain by the military,
But even more than the shootings, the attacks on women — horrific anywhere, but viewed with particular revulsion in Muslim countries like this one — appear to have traumatized the citizenry and hardened the opposition’s determination to force out the leader of the military junta, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara.
….Rape is a fairly common tool of military repression in Africa, but large-scale violence against women has not been a previous government tactic here. “This time, a new stage has been reached,” said Sidya Touré, a former prime minister who was also beaten at the stadium and said he had witnessed brutalities there. “Women as battlefield targets. We could never have imagined that.”
“Where could people get the idea to start raping women in broad daylight?” Mr. Touré asked, in an interview at his home here. “It’s so contrary to our culture.”
Opposition leaders are asking for a “force of intervention to protect us from the ferocity of the Guinean Army.”
I personally remain distracted by the idea of a Muslim group like Hizb ut-Tahrir seeking to bring military governments into power in Muslims nations when these kinds of governments have a long track record of coercive debauch.
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johnpi
Gang-raped woman gets a year in jail and one hundred lashes in Saudi Arabia.
A 23-year-old unmarried woman was awarded one-year prison term and 100 lashes for committing adultery and trying to abort the resultant fetus.
The District Court in Jeddah pronounced the verdict on Saturday after the girl confessed that she had a forced sexual intercourse with a man who had offered her a ride. The man, the girl confessed, took her to a rest house, east of Jeddah, where he and four of friends assaulted her all night long.
The girl claimed that she became pregnant soon after and went to King Fahd Hospital for Armed Forces in an attempt to carry out an abortion. She was eight weeks’ pregnant then, the hospital confirmed.
According to the ruling, the woman will be sent to a jail outside Jeddah to spend her time and will be lashed after delivery of her baby who will take the mother’s last name.
(via)
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johnpi
A Filipino foreign worker who says she was impregnated by rape has been jailed in Saudi Arabia. Her family says they fear she might be held “liable for the crime of fornication or adultery.”
The woman insisted on returning to the Phillipines, but her employer said he would only allow it on condition of her taking a medical examination. When hre pregnancy was discovered, the employer delivered her to the police instead.
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johnpi
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johnpi
Whether you get raped may be determined by what clothes you wear: Dr. Halimah Akbar, campus director for a Muslim women’s college in Uganda.
There’s a hidden message to men in that: Women who aren’t wearing proper clothing are permitted to be raped…
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johnpi
Kenyan women set up “to hell with men” village.
Tired of abuse and suppression a group of women in Kenya have joined forces to establish a female only village in Kenya, where the motto seems to be “to hell with men.”
The village, based 350 kilometers west of the capital of Nairobi, was started by a group of 14 women who decided to escape the dominance of men and live according to their own rules, Germany’s Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA) reported on Wednesday.
Called Umoja, or unity in Swahili, the village has become a safe-haven for women escaping arranged marriages, female genital mutilation (FGM) or rape and abuse.
….Despite the fact that women in the village live on their own, men from neighboring villages continue to harass them and throw stones at them.
“Get out of here. You are cursed,” they yell at them, prompting the women to build a barbed wire fence around the village to protect themselves.
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thabet
Change We Can Make Believe In:
An already staggering epidemic of rape has become markedly worse since the January deployment of tens of thousands of poorly trained, poorly paid Congolese soldiers, with people in front-line villages such as this one saying the soldiers are not so much hunting rebels as hunting women.
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johnpi
Inquiry urged into Iran anti-government protesters’ rape claims.
A previous post here about the utility of rape in marginalizing protesters.
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razib, murtad fitri
Arizona girl’s attack sheds light on rape in Liberia:
The allegation is shocking: an 8-year-old girl lured to a storage shed with the promise of chewing gum, pinned down and sexually assaulted by four boys, none of them older than 14.
The response from the girl’s family sent a second and equally stunning shockwave through their Phoenix, Arizona, community: “The parents felt that they had been shamed or embarrassed by their child,” reported Phoenix police Sgt. Andy Hill.
when i first saw this the headline of an 8 year old raped i assumed it was some freak thing. now that i found out that it’s in the liberian community, i’m thinking, “Oh, OK.” OTOH, the article puts a lot of explanatory blame on rape & the liberian civil war, but it seems that many “traditional” patriarchal cultures exhibit the exact same attitudes as the liberians without the background condition of war & strife. it seems that the ultimate issue here is that in many societies, most until recently, children and women are simply extensions of family-groups, and are given little autonomous individual identity. so the rape of a child brings shame upon the family primarily, and is an assault on an individual only secondarily.
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johnpi
Christian ’shunning’ in Phoenix.
A Liberian man whose 8-year-old daughter allegedly was raped by four boys, and then reportedly shunned by her family, must wait at least three months before possibly regaining custody of the girl.
The father, who is not being named to protect the girl’s identity, met with Child Protective Services on Monday.
The girl was taken into state custody after officials said they heard the victim’s parents blame her and didn’t want her anymore. But the father denied Monday that he ever blamed her or said that his daughter brought shame to the family.
“That is not true,” the father told The Associated Press.
The family’s pastor, who accompanied him to the meeting, said it will be 90 days until CPS officials reassess the situation. No arrangements for visitation have been made.
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johnpi
Another story of state-directed prison rape out of Iran – this time it’s a woman.
Taraneh’s is not the first allegation of brutal raping of a post-election protester — according to the UK Guardian, an 18 year old boy in Shiraz was repeatedly gang raped by prison officials while in detention after being arrested for participating in the protests on June 15. That boy’s father won’t let him back in the family home.
Despite its agitations for reform, Iranian society remains traditional, according to Iranian-British blogger Potkin Azarmehr, and it’s the stigma of rape that is being used as a weapon against the protesters. “By killing protesters, the government makes martyrs of them, but by raping them and allowing them to live, it makes them shunned in society,” Azarmehr said….
Prison abuse and torture is also about marking these victims as defiled human beings — it’s like a scarlet letter of social isolation against them, to deny them the community support and strength which they need to move past those memories and not be defined by them. This is where others can step in and change the very attitudes toward abuse which so many institutions count on when they commit these crimes.
That last sentence is very important for the rest of us, wherever and among whoever we make our community.
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johnpi
‘Slut shaming’ and the victimology of rape.
In the UK Telegraph, an article claims new research shows provocatively dressed women are more likely to get raped. The “scientists” in question are actually a dissertation student, who said her unpublished research would not support the conclusion reached by the newspaper.
Furthermore, as blogged by Natasha Chart, actual research on this specific question (who gets targeted for rape) has been published:
Conventional wisdom holds that women who dress provocatively draw attention and put themselves at risk of sexual assault. But studies show that it is women with passive, submissive personalities who are most likely to be raped-and that they tend to wear body-concealing clothing, such as high necklines, long pants and sleeves, and multiple layers. Predatory men can accurately identify submissive women just by their style of dress and other aspects of appearance. The hallmarks of submissive body language, such as downward gaze and slumped posture, may even be misinterpreted by rapists as flirtation. …
Chart concludes, “A rape culture that blames women who step out of line as ‘asking for’ rape would in fact create more victims by this sort of evaluation. It would create more women whose body language suggests that they’re afraid of being looked at, whose posture is fearful and cringing, who are afraid of the negative judgment, keep their heads down and shuffle meekly along.”
So what would a culture look like that “instilled such confidence in young women that they would legitimately be less likely to be attacked?” Chart asks. It might look like the Amish:
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thabet
More protests in Indian-administered Kashmir:
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thabet
Algerian Feminists Slammin’ Americans (and the French): A review of Marnia Lazreg’s new book, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad.
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johnpi
Scott Horton reports that the descriptions of the Abu Ghraib photos that Obama is withholding are accurate after all. He says some of the withheld photos are still circulating among soldiers in Iraq, one of whom showed some of them to him.
He also recounts the history of media attacks by the Pentagon spokesman who derided the entirety of British journalism over the Daily Telegraph report.
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johnpi
Photos that Obama is fighting to prevent from being released to the public of abuse at Abu Ghrab includes images of a man and a woman being raped, by a US translator and a US soldier, respectively.
Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.
Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.
Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
Aziz wrote here recently in support of not releasing the photos.
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aziz
It seems that death is literally too good for The Monster of Mahmoudiyah. Iraqis who expected justice from the American military are left disappointed in the gap between our values and our actions, yet again.
This is the sort of case that complicates my own convictions.
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thabet
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Kawthar
A 3-minute rape scene in a popular TV show has “stirred debate” in Saudi Arabia.
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Kawthar
3 men in Pakistan were acquitted of raping a 13 year old Christian girl, despite medical evidence and eye witness accounts that proved their guilt.
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thabet
“Corrective” rape in South Africa.
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johnpi
Mukhtar Mai, Pakistani gang-rape victim and internationally celebrated activist, gets married.
A Pakistani gang-rape victim who shunned custom and rose to global fame by speaking out about her case has defied another local taboo _ she just got married.
Mukhtar Mai is now the second wife of Nasir Abbas Gabol, a police officer who was assigned to protect her as her case gained notoriety. He said she was reluctant to accept his offer and that he threatened suicide when she turned him down.
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johnpi
New Time magazine article: Iraq’s unspeakable crime: Mothers pimping daughters.
While sexual violence has accompanied warfare for millennia and insecurity always provides opportunities for criminal elements to profit, what is happening in Iraq today reveals how far a once progressive country (relative to its neighbors) has regressed on the issue of women’s rights and how ferociously the seams of a traditional Arab society that values female virginity have been ripped apart.
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thabet
The violence against women in the Congo defies (a very sick) imagination.
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thabet
Turkey’s ‘hidden shame’ (and a consequence of the quasi-fascism of the Turkish republic’s founding and its obsession with ethnic coherence).
