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from the don't-blame-the-messenger-—-charge-them dept.
A U.K.-based human rights organization has urged Britons living in the United Arab Emirates to not report incidents of rape or sexual assaults following the case of a British woman who was allegedly gang raped in Dubai and after reporting it was arrested and charged with "extramarital sex" charges.
[...] The organization Detained in Dubai, which provides legal assistance to foreign people arrested in the UAE regardless of their citizenship and financial status, has already launched a petition at Change.org, urging authorities to take action on the matter.
[...] Radha Stirling, a U.S. citizen founder of the charity, said to The Independent that following the recent case – as well as a number of other shocking incidents in recent years where rape victims have been detained in the UAE – she advises British tourists not to report crime.
Human rights organizations have asked the UAE monarchies to match their country's great economic growth and tourism potential with changes to its legal system to improve and develop the legal rights and process.
From guide2dubai.com:
In 2013, the total population of UAE was recorded to be 9.2 million. Out of the 9.2 million, the expatriates contributed to around 7.8 million with the Emirati Nationals holding a population share of 1.4 million. [...] South Asian countries alone contributes to around 58% of the total population of UAE. The western population shares to around 8% of the overall population of the country.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday November 20 2016, @08:46PM
You pay the father 50 shekels (about $100) and marry her.
That's only applicable under Sanhedrin's laws which only dealt with the financial laws (דיני ממונות) as relating to compensating the victim. Specifically to the rape of a non-virgin woman, they only penalized the rapist with a fine and marriage to the victim should she demand it.
However, the Hebrew King's laws were a whole different matter. While they required two witnesses for a conviction, their sentencing went far and beyond anything the bible spells out. e.g. In the three accounts of rape in the old testament, the rapist was executed. Moreover, in 2/3 cases their family and neighbors were executed as well.
More over, double convictions were regular. That is, the King's court tried in rape cases of non-virgins as well. So in effect, a rapist could very well get executed, have their family get executed, have their village razed and have whatever left under their name transfer to the holdings of the victim.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday November 20 2016, @10:37PM
While they required two witnesses for a conviction, their sentencing went far and beyond anything the bible spells out. e.g. In the three accounts of rape in the old testament, the rapist was executed. Moreover, in 2/3 cases their family and neighbors were executed as well.
I assume you're talking about Dinah, Tamar, and the concubine in Judges? It should be noted in those 2/3 of cases (Dinah and the Judges story) where you say "the family and neighbors were executed as well," that what happens NEXT is most telling. In the case of Dinah [wikipedia.org], her brothers (the sons of Jacob) trick the rapist and his tribe into getting circumcised, then kill all the men while they're in pain, and then take all the women (and children and goods) for themselves, thus presumably committing many more rapes on the rapist's tribe than what started this whole thing.
It gets even worse in Judges after the battle of Gibeah [wikipedia.org], where -- after the systematic slaughter of most of the Tribe of Benjamin for their kinsmen's role in the rape -- it is decided that the Tribe of Benjamin can't die off. (But, it's implied that most of the women of Benjamin were killed during these battles, probably after themselves being "abused.") Hence, they find a village that didn't show up to go out and slaughter the Benjaminites, and they decide the virgins from that village should be the new wives for the Benjaminites -- so they go and slaughter all the men and married women there, but they only got 400 virgins for their effort... which wasn't enough for the remaining Benjaminites. So, the Bible has its own "Rape of the Sabine Women" kind of moment, where the men of the Tribe of Benjamin go and literally grab a bunch of women from a neighboring town during a festival.
So, yeah, I guess you could say that the "rapist" was executed here, along with a lot of other people in revenge for the rape. But then they went out and found hundreds of other women to forcibly become the wives of the remaining members of the offending tribe. Not exactly modern "justice" when the remedy for one gang rape is committing systematic rape on a massive scale! (Though this sort of thing IS actually common in societies around that area of the world at that time. Legal codes often said that if a man raped a woman, then the family of the woman was allowed to rape his wife in retaliation.) And a similar thing is endorsed by Moses in Numbers 31, where he exacts revenge on the Midianites by commanding the army to kill all men and non-virgin women, while "saving" the virgins for themselves.
Oh, where was I? Oh, the third one -- Tamar [wikipedia.org]. Yeah, here we have a case where the rapist was murdered -- but only after his father (King David) didn't even bother to act. So it was only his jealous half-brother (Absalom) of the rapist who eventually had the rapist murdered on behalf of his sister... after waiting for two years. Anyhow, this is hardly an example of a functional legal system, when the king refuses to act (even though this involved not only rape, but what would have qualified as incest). Yes, the perpetrator was the king's son, but the whole business is a bit convoluted, and I don't think we can draw conclusions about the way the legal system was supposed to function from it.
More over, double convictions were regular. That is, the King's court tried in rape cases of non-virgins as well. So in effect, a rapist could very well get executed, have their family get executed, have their village razed and have whatever left under their name transfer to the holdings of the victim.
... and then all the unmarried woman of the relatives/village/entire society of the rapists could then be systematically "taken as wives" in return. It's important to mention that part. :)
Bottom line is that "justice" back then was a heck of a lot different from what we'd think rational today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @06:14PM
The point is that rape was considered a serious crime equatable to murder. And paying a token sum wasn't going to get you away with it.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday November 21 2016, @08:22PM
And paying a token sum wasn't going to get you away with it.
Except apparently if you participated in mass rape in retaliation for rape, in which case all is apparently forgiven. That was MY point.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday November 21 2016, @08:34PM
Also, I'd just point out one thing that may not be clear from my description above, which is that many ancient societies did not consider "marital rape" to be possible. That is, a man could basically do whatever he wanted with his wife, whether she wanted to or not, and that was considered perfectly reasonable and normal.
If anything, the distinction made by the Bible and its laws compared to the legal codes of other tribes in the region is that the Bible at least generally forced men to take responsibility for their rapes. Hence we have the statutes about paying the father a sum and then marrying the virgin he raped. Similarly, in the Benjamin accounts and the Midianites, we don't have random raping of married women or whatever condoned -- instead, they'd slaughter the rest of the population and take all the virgins -- forcibly, if necessary -- as "wives."
So, no, you couldn't just get away with rape by paying a small fine in general -- in Hebrew society, you were expected to marry the girl and potentially keep abusing her until she produced a son as heir. I don't mean to put it in such stark terms, but that was simply the norm of MANY ancient societies. Women often didn't have a lot of choice in these matters. That's just the way it was, and the biblical accounts aren't outliers here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:33PM
ancient societies did not consider "marital rape" to be possible
Not in Hebrew law. They even had legal exemptions in the marriage agreement allowing the husband to dissolve a consummated marriage if the wife wasn't willing or able. That is, she was in her right to refuse as he was in his right to walk away from the marriage if she did. But he wasn't in the right to force sex.