Australian woman raped in UAE, spends 8 months in prison for "adultery"

Immigration laws are not unjust. Merely failing to satisfy your imagined entitlement to access and prosperity does not violate individual rights, as is the case with rape.

Nice troll, El Chup! You've got 4 pages of outrage and a ton of negreps for your efforts...!

Not the point. The point is that, if you're visiting a foreign country, you don't get to pick and choose which laws you're going to respect, regardless of how stupid or vile those laws are.

That discretionary power always remains an option. There are those laws that respect individual rights, and those that are to be disregarded, no matter what the location.

That said, I'm not offering to fix the UAE's problems for them.

Perhaps I should have said "you don't get to pick and choose which laws you're going to respect without running the risk of some seriously unpleasant consequences."

Yeah, on that part you're most likely wrong.

This is also not the first lawsuit she's launching - the hotel group was first.

While none of this makes the situation any better, I'd still like to point out three things:
1.) The laws on adultery and drinking are well known - disagreeable as they may be (I think they are)
2.) The situation of women within parts of the GCC (I would tend to exclude Saudi) is actually fairly strong. There are many women in much more senior positions in companies than I have seen in Europe.
3.) Overall, the UAE is pretty accommodating towards foreigners and different cultures.

The obvious fact remains that her having to go to jail for being raped is an atrocity, however.

You don't "risk" rape, and no law that proceeds from the assumption that it is a reasonable consequence for anything can have any legitimacy.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Are we playing the pedant game because I didn't connect every single fucking dot and one of the possible interpretations doesn't make sense?

The law is based on the assumption that any woman who is raped must've brought it on herself by not obediently standing under a man's protection.

The "risk" isn't that you might be raped. The "risk" is that, if you do get raped, going to the police will get you punished as well because that's how fucked up their legal system is.


And yes, it's deplorable. But it's not a secret. Anyone travelling there realizes that.

I know that. I said that. I just didn't build it out of fucking Duplo blocks.

The "risk" extends from the assumption that there are circumstances where a woman should have expected to be raped, even brought it on herself by not submitting to their misogyinistic savagery.

I certainly hope that was his goal. Otherwise, he hasn't exactly done a stellar job of proving his superiority as per this comment:

Wow. A lot of people bit on what looked like pretty obvious bait to me.

Aaand the "B-Plot" in this thread goes to Eminem:

There's also the part where her rapists weren't punished but their victim was.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-...pe-crisis-study-reveals-shocking-new-numbers/

The full information about Eminence's study. Read the whole article (2 pgs) and you'll see that it was 3500 household surveys that a whole lot of assumptions were extrapolated from.

Conveniently left out that the majority of rapes in the Congo are "intimate partner" rapes, which have nothing in common with what this topic is about.

Oh, I found out that the reason she was accused of adultery is because a few of her rapists are married...not because she is. It just gets more outrageous the more you hear.

Remember, boys and girls, according to Sharia Law, men can't and don't commit adultery, but women can and do, even if they're not married.

"And what do you burn apart from witches?"
"More witches!"

Well, at least you are no longer framing it as an 'Internet source.'

Well no, not quite. The Congo has a long history of many different types of sexual violence against women, and there is a reason why it is described by experts who have spent significant amounts of time there as "the worst in the world."

I think you may be reading into this more that just what the article says, and what I said, as this was just one citation, speaking about one type of violence.

I could provide several others, and I think anybody who might think that is some sort of limit on the types of violence perpetrated against women is not well informed on the matter.

To more fully dispel the notion that it is simply domestic violence, consider the following:

So it's quite easy to see, if women are being raped in front of their husbands, it's not just a domestic violence matter.

But again, that has little to do with what I was talking about though in the first place. One more time:

I didn't make an absolute statement like "The very last place a Western woman should want to go is some Islamic country. Key part here is absolute terms in which this statement was made.

Instead, I made a relative, proportional statement... that "there are far worse places." Notice how it is in relation to, in comparison of the subject at hand, Islamic countries.

Relative comparisons imo can be made with much greater ease and requiring less personal familiarity than absolute statements. In fact, that is the very purpose of relative statements, to approximate when we cannot say something of our own experience, when we cannot say for sure; and we see it all the time, in various forms, across many disciplines.

We saw it in early chemists when, because they couldn't "go visit the nucleus and orbitals of an atom for 3 weeks to find out its mass", they instead made the relative atomic mass relationship between hydrogen (assigning hydrogen 1 arbitrarily) and carbon, and came up with the ratio 1:12; thus creating a system for quantifying the mass of all atoms, even as they did not know the actual mass of the carbon atom. Today of course, they have much more direct and precise methods for calculating mass, but the relative framework provided meaningful analysis, even while they still couldn't say with absolute certainty. It is the "in comparison to" aspect, that is important here.

We see it elsewhere too -- biostatistics has many relative scales, psychology has many relatives scale, often times exams are graded not on an absolute scale but on a relative scale, the list goes on and on.

As for the matter of being present in a country before commenting, again, I was not making an absolute statement.

If you are making a statement of such specificity, then yes, I do think you have the burden of having at least your own experience on the matter.

But if you are comparing, if you are making relative, and in-relation-to remarks, the standard is a bit less severe, since relative relationships are inherently approximate and based on some arbitrary equalizing denominator.

Now, if someone wants to argue that "1,000 rapes a day in the DRC is not as bad as 1 rape and imprisonment in the UAE", that's fine. I would have to disagree on which is worse, as even just the sheer numbers illustrate a significantly staggering situation across the two compared subjects. But the statement as I made it, a relative statement, can be made without personally experiencing methods of analysis. Absolute statements imo should have a much higher standard.

Oh maaaaaaaaaaan, this thread.

We will never have an accurate view of the rape statistics in countries where Sharia Law rules....many, many women won't report being raped because of this very reason...the punishment she would endure as well as embarrassment for the family and loss of honor.

Also, about the Congo..

I think it depends where you go there. Some places are peaceful and under control and others are still dangerous and under travel warnings:

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_2198.html

Not that any of it matters...any place that has policies in place that makes victims into the criminals are places to be avoided...nitpicking over who is more horrible is a waste of time...just avoid them all.

And some of the places mentioned in that are exactly where I was, and others are places about which I did research.

The government issues travel warnings basically so people can't say "But you never told us there was a risk!" no matter how slight that risk is. They're kind of like the "risk of terrorist attacks" that are more of a CYA thing than a real "Keep out of here!" thing.

In fact, Maniema and South Kivu provinces in particular are very calm and getting calmer all the time. I also met a single American girl who was in North Kivu for seven months (fairly young and pretty; the kind who would be at risk if DRC was the way Eminence claims it is) and she reported the same thing.

Although I didn't research it specifically and can't say from personal experience (as I mentioned to Stallion in the Green Room thread), the conflict in Ituri (the region that borders on Uganda and Sudan, and almost certaintly the most unstable part of the whole country) is also much cooler now than it was a few years ago.

The bottom line is that DRC is not the calmest place in the world, but to use it as an example of a country that is worse for women than Islamic countries where women have basically no legal protection if they are raped, is just silly. Sure, you can get raped there, but the risks to a white woman are significantly less than to a local women (they're scared of whites; the very fact that a white is there shows that they are rich and powerful by DRC standards, or they would never get that far; I had to smile and wave and greet people in Swahili all the time in order to reassure them that they had nothing to fear from this "muzungo") and, if it did happen, the woman would not end up being punished for it, which is the whole point of this thread.

Which is why Eminence's claims are nonsensical.

But again, that is not what was said in terms of the statement I was responding to! It was not a statement that referred only to the legal rights following sexual violence. It was saying again:

That is a very general, encompassing, overreaching statement. Heck, even in the post in which that statement originates, we see it is not only about legal protection after rape, because accompanying it are statements about "Control of Father, Control of brother, Control of husband." The multitude of general issues with Islamic countries is dripping, and clearly the statement was not talking only about what you are now trying to retcon. You are adding limitations to its scope, after the fact. It's extremely illogical.

Now, you can try and argue for the implicit inferences of the statement (which would still be inaccurate, as other statements about father, brother, husband were also made in the same exact post), or make appeals about "well, what's the general topic of the thread" but then you would just be a nonsensical hypocrite, since I seem to recall you arguing over the same lack of specificity (even though the implicit subject of the thread was obvious) with Vandy a few days ago. But please, go right ahead.

You've got to explain your logic to me here...

Would be interesting to see where you got that bit from, Tamar - this just isn't the logic (however flawed) that is normally used (genuinely interested - not trolling here). That one is actually very simple: sex before marriage is outlawed. Obviously this applies to both men and women in whatever combination of partners - and both go to jail if they violate it and get caught.

And as I have said to you a number of times, you could have given other examples to demonstrate that the statement you dislike ("If you're a Western woman, the very last place you should go is an Islamic country") could use a little fine-tuning. North Korea would have been a good example.

You chose instead DRC, and despite me telling you that your information is out of date (it comes from the end of the war, not today) and irrelevent (it deals with the risk to local women, not the risk to Western women, and in a case that is very different from the subject here which is that if a Western woman does get in trouble in an Islamic country, she has little or no legal protection) you refused to say, "Ok, maybe my example wasn't the best, but the principle still stands." Which would have been quite acceptable, and even true.

Let's face it, you picked the wrong time to make statements about the DRC. Right now, my desk is piled high with papers as I sort out the results of my trip to DRC, in order to prepare reports of my visits with governmental, educational, religious, business and health-care leaders in the DRC and give [some people, whose identities are nobody else's business] a report on the best way to help in the reconstruction of the country after the war. But the best you've been able to come up with is telling me, "You don't know much about it; I've read an article on the country!"

You can argue until you're blue in the face, and you might even convince someone else. (Though if the other posts in this thread are anything to go on, you aren't succeeding very well at that, either.) But trying to convince someone who has just returned from a fact-finding visit to the country that you know more about it, because of some article you read, than what can be found out by going there, visiting some of the worst places, and discussing with the people who have the most influence in their society, is just kind of silly.

But do carry on. You're not convincing, but at least you're amusing.

Unless it's in a roleplay scenario.

Also, Eminence has been making some really good posts on the topic of this thread.

And at all of you rising up to El Chup's troll.

If anyone should have been trolling this thread, it should have been me.

Its too late to troll the shit outta this thread now!

ElChup took away my hours and hours of glory!!!

!

Well, you can try and make this about me claiming to know more about the DRC -- I can see how the caricature might help when you have nothing else -- but I highly doubt I made any such statement.

What I did say however is (to the effect) "I think that my source (which btw you derided as "some Internet source" before I pointed out where it came from), the American Journal of Public Health, knows more about this specific subject, the situation related to rape in the Congo, than you do."

Now, if you know more about rape in the Congo than the AJPH, by all means, say so. I get that you talk to officials in the country, but is rape of women what you are specifically assessing in the Congo?

Also, look, I get the DRC is of personal affinity to you right now. But you should not let your personal feelings toward the country cloud your analysis. The type of change you are ascribing to the country sounds still nascent at best. Are you hopeful that it has turned some corner and things are better all around there? Sounds like it, and sounds like it has, which is great. It may even be an accurate picture of what is happening this hour, this minute, that things are getting better. But history counts, certainly recent history, and a few short years after such a long period of strife is simply not enough time to say with certainty that things are much better there now. It would, further, be irresponsible to say "oh yeah, it's safe here again, come back folks!" It takes a bit longer than a few years to be making those types of remarks.

The fact also remains, that the DRC has shown, comparatively and recently, a greater horror toward women than what we have seen goes on in the UAE. In terms of why that statement was made -- as a response to a blanket statement about Islamic countries -- the facts are correct.

So no matter how many times you try and redefine and reinvent the subject at hand when the original remarks were made; or no matter how many different ways you project your own reading, instead of what was actually written, the statement as written was appropriate. I think implicitly though, you know that already, as you concede in a round about way that the statement could benefit from some "fine-tuning." A terrific way to smooth over what is said.

Finally, you seem to keep saying that there is no significant risk to western women in the DRC. Sure, the risk is probably less than someone who is a native there, but rapist, when push comes to shove, hardly discriminates for who is Western and who isn't. So a risk, and a substantial risk, if the history is any indication, still exists. Note also, the psychology of a rapist is vastly different than the business folk and locals you talk to who are amazed or in deference to a white or Western person. To substitute the psychology of the folks with whom you've interacted for what a potential rapist in the DRC might be thinking is silly. The history itself as indicators, on the other hand shows that the risk is still there for women, western, local, or not. I will say this much, that I don't always, when it comes to women's rights, differentiate as some do in this thread between East and West, as I believe in a set of universal rights for all women. I'm concerned for the well being of all women, and quite honestly, don't naturally think in terms of "Western, local, or whatever."

Not true. Simply and blatantly not true. Not in DRC in any case.

Continue to claim that you know more about the subject than I do, though. It's an amusing claim.

And you still haven't responded to the question I asked you, that you thought was so pertinent to those claiming to know about what goes on in Islamic countries: How much time have you spent in the DRC?

Afraid to answer it?

Ladies and gentlemen...

[yt=...Mister Conway Twitty!]OlhYYsKY1Ec[/yt]