Afghan rape victim 'attacked again by government workers protecting her'

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

A teenage Afghan rape victim who secured a rare conviction of her attacker has said she was assaulted this month for a second time, by a group of government employees tasked with protecting her.

The 15-year-old schoolgirl, from Daikundi province in Afghanistan's freezing, poor central highlands, was first raped four months ago while she was on her way to school, said Nowruz Ali Ataee, head of the provincial criminal investigation department.

In an unusual move for a young girl in conservative rural Afghanistan, where a rape is often considered to bring shame on an entire family, she reported the attack. Equally unusually, for a country that passed a law banning violence against women four years ago but has been slow to implement it, police found and arrested her rapist. He was recently jailed for 16 years and an accomplice was given a five-year sentence.

But the girl had to travel to the provincial capital for the case, and was temporarily living in an "education reform" centre that Daikundi officials said shelters women and children with no family.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/23/afghan-rape-victim-attacked-government

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Unfortunately, you could easily replace "Afghan" with "American" in the headline. Where IS it safe for women to live, Mars?

[leftynyc]

1. I'll take my chances in NYC

rather than put myself in the hands of people who think honor is more important than violence. But that's just me.

[TheMadMonk]

5. Care to take a look at the gangland culture...

...of your homeland.

Twisted honour and loyalty is what keeps the Crips and Bloods at each other's throats. Also kept the Hatfield/McCoy feud alive through how many presidents?

[leftynyc]

6. Crips and bloods are California

Can't speak to CA but here in NY when gangs break the law, they go on trial and if convicted, go to jail. What that has to do with women in these cultures being forced to marry their rapists or get killed for holding hands and "ruining their families honor" is totally beyond me. You're trying cultural relativism with the wrong person because I most certainly do not believe that all cultures are created equal.

[TheMadMonk]

8. Western familiy honour has been protected just as jealously...

...in the not very distant past.

May not have ROUTINELY killed "dishonouring daughters" but did very routinely forcibly cloister them in covents. Did murder or otherwise dispose of embarrassing newborns. Did lynch plenty of black folk for looking at someone's sister sideways. Did force our daughters into unwanted and abusive marriages.

We also worked thousands (if not millions of children to death) in the textile mills, the dye works and tanneries, down t'pit. (And continue to encourage other nations to do it, to our profit. Foxcon touchy feely reforms aside.)

Virtually every ship that sailed from European docks did so with a boy on board to be used and abused for the sexual gratification of the ship's officers.

FFS, We still fucking well debate whether or not it's rape when the one doing it is someone "special" like the star quarterback, or a Name in Hollywood or the Hamptons.


What difference there is, lies almost solely in degree, because there's fuck all to pick between the sides when it comes to the basic nature of the indignities one human being can visit on another.

There's a word for someone who elevates their own culture above all others. It's 'bigot'.

I might not like what's going on in Afghanistan, I fucking well hate it. However, at least I'm smart enough to realise that the ONLY path to lasting improvement there is for them to go to hell in their own handbasket first.

While life for Afghanni women has never been any bed of roses, it has become immesurably worse for outside intervention. I strongly suspect that sheer bloody minded contrariness is what now drives most of the worst abuses against women and children in Afghanistan. Anything the outside world, particularly America, says is wrong is carried out with religious fervour.

[leftynyc]

9. You think an anonymous poster

calling me a bigot because, as a woman, I would rather live here than any country ruled by sharia, knock yourself out. Leaves me free to ignore the rest of what you have to say.

[TheMadMonk]

13. What you get when you use "some are more equal...

...than others" type phraseology straight out of Animal Farm.

And it has nothing to do with where you'd rather live, or who's laws you'd rather live under. FFS I wouldn't recommend Afghanistan for Sara Palin. I wouldn't recommend it for it's own bloody inhabitants.

Straight up however, outside intervention of the type that's happening in Afghanistan is making life an even/ever greater hell for the vast majority of women in that country. We rescue one girl, ten others are made to suffer for her good fortune.

Sadly we don't have much choice but to wait for them to get their own house in order, because the alternatives don't really bear thinking about. Kidnap at gunpoint every woman and child, and "reeducate them", or kill virtually every male over the age of 12, then do it all over again as soon as the survivors are old enough to start taking revenge.

[Ash_F]

10. You been up on Steubenville?

Nothing wrong here. Look away, keep your eyes straight ahead whistling dixie.

[leftynyc]

11. Seriously?

You're going to compare one small shithole of a town in one state with the systemic, religiously motivated degradation of women in at least a dozen countries? Seriously? I'm guessing the treatment of women doesn't figure too high on your list of priorities. Certainly not as high as thinking the US is the root of all evil.

[Ash_F]

12. You guess at my priorities...

without pointing to any evidence, while minimizing the crime as some kind of outlier in the content of your own post. What happened in that town is part of a larger problem.

The mindset of "thank goodness...not in MY COUNTRY/TOWN" doesn't advance any causes.

[heaven05]

2. this

culture is evil. Is the fact that they view women so negatively due to religion or just cultural neanderthalism?

[Mz Pip]

3. Probably a combination

I suspect they cherry pick their scriptures to justify their behavior.

[formercia]

4. Back to the Future

There was a time when most of the World behaved like this. If you want to see what the World was like during the Dark Ages, go to Afghanistan.

[Odin2005]

7. Barbarians, fucking barbarians.

Poor young lady!