Raped, Disowned Child

It is unspeakably horrible to envisage a child of eight, a trusting little girl enticed by a group of boys, accused of being responsible for a group attack where the child is repeatedly raped. What, after all, does an eight-year-old little girl know, what can she do to protect herself? What could possibly be going through her mind while she is being assaulted repeatedly, other than to beg her tormentors to leave her, and wish for her parents to rescue her.

There are societies, traditions, cultures and religion-inspired laws that believe women, even girls, are responsible for the dreadful things that men do to them. Parents who believe that their despoiled daughters are no longer valuable as living human beings, flesh of their flesh. Love they may have lavished in raising these daughters suddenly vanishes in the face of a belief that the honour of their family and of their line has been irremediably besmirched.

Leaving them to relinquish their interest in a girl-child or a daughter or a sister, a wife, a niece, entirely. Blaming them for insubordination to the dictates of a patriarchal society. Particularly one - given the prevalence of 'dishonour' and 'honour killings' in Muslim societies - where Islamic sharia law demands harsh punishments; stoning, lashing, death for women in circumstances where they are accused of loose morals.

It defies belief in the nature of family and the relationship between fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, that family honour will have been seen to have been offended by a daughter speaking with a man not of her family, dressing 'inappropriately', defying the authority of male family members, being attracted to the company of a man not approved by her father. Leading to a deserved punishment.

Which, in the case of family honour seen to have been more seriously impacted by a daughter found to have had sex outside of marriage - or as has happened, being the victim of a rape, seen to have stained and defiled the family through her vile conduct - leading inexorably to a far more grave punishment than merely being beaten. The father, the brother or the uncle of the offending woman is tasked with restoring family honour by restorative murder.

Or a committee of village elders led by a cleric administering shariah law commits a girl child who has been raped and considered guilty of using female wiles to corrupt an otherwise honourable male to countless lashes. In other instances, a woman who has committed adultery sentenced to be stoned to death. In cities, those authorized as defenders of the faith as policing agents for virtues and vice will beat and arrest women for being improperly clad.

As in Sudan recently where the General Discipline Police Authority who patrol streets in their zeal to maintain standards of public decency arrested thirteen women gathered in a restaurant - for the criminal offence of wearing trousers. For this violation of the Sudanese criminal code the women were penalized by a punishing sentence of receiving 40 lashes.

In countries like Jordan, Lebanon, the PA-administered territory, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim world, a family's men, whether it is the father, a young son or another male relative, who enact the justice of shariah law for dishonouring a family, may receive no sentence at all, or a brief, notional sentence, because it is generally recognized that they were responsible not for murder, but for cleansing the family's dignity of dishonour.

All of this is horrible, an assault on human dignity, the freedom of human nature, on women's human rights, but they appear to elicit little real interest from the world at large. Until situations erupt in other parts of the world, Europe or North America where immigrants bringing their cultural traditions with them, exercise the same kind of moral punishments there that they are accustomed to doing in their places of origin.

The sad and sordid story of an eight-year-old girl living with her Liberian family in Phoenix, Arizona, who was lured with the promise of chewing gum to a shed close to a vacant apartment where she was restrained and raped by four boys aged nine to fourteen, and who was then disowned by her parents for bringing shame to her family, is one of those items that catches the reader's instant disbelief.

A child who has undergone such a horribly traumatic violation, and whose physical state and mental anguish is ignored. Instead of being gathered to her family, her grievous wounds lovingly tended to, she has been spurned, to suffer abandoned and alone. The family of the child blames her for the assault and rape perpetrated upon her. She is held to be responsible for the situation that has resulted in her family honour being sullied.

Devastatingly unspeakable.