What is going wrong with our world?
By sharra1
@sharra1 (6340)
Australia
March 27, 2011 11:01pm CST
What is wrong with our world these days? I just read a news report that a young Australian woman working in the United Arab Emirates as a manager in an international hotel has just been released from prison after 8 months. Her only crime was being raped but under their law she was charged and convicted of adultery. Really odd since she is not married but maybe her rapists were. She was told not to go public with this for fear of harsh treatment. Now she is back home and suffering from post traumatic stress and wants her story heard as a warning to other women not to work in this country. She believes she was drugged as she remembers nothing between her last drink and waking up in her room injured. At the hospital she was told she had been raped and she reported it to police as any woman would in Australia. That is seems was her crime. She was taken to a judge and then to prison. Had she kept quiet she might have been safe.
She was told that under their Islamic law a woman is not regarded as raped unless she has 4 male Muslim witnesses, anything else is consenting she had been injured in the attack. Well I never heard of a rapist inviting any witnesses to a rape. To me this is just an anti female law. Since her employer did not protect her in any way it is clear to me that women cannot trust working in any country under Muslim law as they will have no protection if anything goes wrong.
As a woman I would not even feel safe being a tourist in any country under Muslim law as they seem to have no respect for women at all. There is something seriously wrong with a world where women are treated like this. I cannot understand how some men seem to believe that they are the only beings that count. Without women they would not exist.
There is an increase in violence against women in my society as well but at least here women are not locked up for being victims. I find the increase in violence very disturbing. The world seemed a safer place when I was a child but it was also a place where I was ignored because I was a female, where my ideas and thoughts were laughed at as silly women stuff. Now women are proving that they have the ability to do more than just produce male children and the world is no longer a safe place.
What do you think?
1 person likes this
4 responses
@kalyani1234 (637)
• India
28 Mar 11
It is indeed very appalling and disgusting Sharra! But then it comes as no surprise to me because I have seen a lot of Muslim women in my country suffer at the hands of their own fathers, brothers and husbands under the guise of protecting the woman's and family's honor. The so-called law by which the rape can be confirmed to have taken place only if there are at least four male muslims exists in Pakistan too.
My mother knows a muslim girl who, at the age of 13, became amother of her first child, and now at the age of 20 is mother to three children, living with her parents as she has been left by her husband, has no penny to her name and now earns livelihood by somehow scraping for work around!
What you said is very true that violence against the women has increased everywhere, even in India, but the kind of existence the muslim women are forced to live is simply unimaginable, it is so appalling!
1 person likes this
@sharra1 (6340)
• Australia
29 Mar 11
The poor girl. I thought muslim law required the husband to provide for his wife. The trouble is that this law lets misogynists rule. The west was like that once as well but women have finally overcome some of the problems. It bothers me that women were more equal in pagan time than in our so called enlightened society.
It seems that the more freedom women gain the more violence they face. I was particularly disturbed by a report recently of a gang of male children sexually assaulting women. There was also a report of a 9 year old girl who would not go to school without her mother because the boys were assualting her and bullying. The school had done nothing to help either. Maybe the answer is to teach all the girls how to fight back. It does not always work but bullies are often cowards and do not like getting hurt.
@kalyani1234 (637)
• India
29 Mar 11
Yes, Sharra1, you are right. Women were probably much better off during the pagan times than now. Actually any law, any religion requires that the men look after their wives, but the law is not so much twisted as is done so in the Muslim religion. The young girl that I wrote about was abandoned by her husband because she was unable to produce a male child! Another woman I knew was left by her husband even though she had a son, was because the son was diagnosed at the age of 10 as having a faulty valve in his heart. So the husband could not bothered enough to seek medical treatment for his son, he just left his wife and their two children and went and had a second marriage!
Horrifying, isn't it?
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@sharra1 (6340)
• Australia
30 Mar 11
Yes it is, especially in a religion that states that the man can have up to 4 wives but all must be treated equally. I do not believe that includes dumping them. The laws that allow him to do that are clearly in favour of men.
I wonder at the parents who let him marry their daughter knowing that he has a history of dumping his wives.
@tarachand (3895)
• India
5 Jun 11
I strongly condemn the actions of the country that has imprisoned the victim because of old an archaic laws/misinterpretations of the law.
Change in human thinking, in laws is happening, but not as fast as the understanding about equality of sexes, of the various freedoms that are a birthright of all humans is happening globally. Unfortunately, the Islamic world seems to be moving more and more backwards, towards fundamentalism as old ways and thinking are challenged.
Laws are also subject to interpretation and unfortunately, in a society that has rules, regulations and laws that are archaic and belong to the middle ages, the interpretation still favors the male, and especially the Muslim male.
As understanding grows, with it will grow the demand of what is fundamentally correct and right, unfortunately again, we may not see that within our own lifetimes.
Christianity and Islam are some of the youngest religions in the world when one compares them to Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and many other mature religions. Christianity is making some amount of progress and struggling to keep up with the times, Islam has not even made an attempt in most Islamic states. Most Islamic nations practice intolerance towards any other religion and are absolutely partial towards the practitioners of Islam, with those from their own sects getting a precedence over those from Muslims of other sects.
I agree that women are stronger than men and better than them in many things and more than deserve a place along with men in every sphere, if not above them in many cases. I think over time, it is not only sexism that is making the world an unsafe place, it is need, greed of money as well as power, and the biggest culprit -ego on a massive scale that is responsible for the increase in the feeling of lack of security.
The needs could be anything, be they material or emotional - maybe just the yearning for equality - this could be caste, a yearning for religious tolerance, maybe just a yearning for acceptance as a human being that could lead to the threatened one either being proactive and acting violently or reacting towards violence on her/his/its or on her/his/its loved ones/things/beliefs/etc.
But I think that there will be a time when there will be no boundaries of any sort and all humans will be equal with common laws across the earth and all planets that humans occupy. I just pray that this happens soon.
@sharra1 (6340)
• Australia
6 Jun 11
I quite agree with you. I would like to believe that the change will happen in our lifetime but these days I doubt it. When I was a young girl I saw so many women in refuges running from husbands that beat them and I hoped then that things would change. Unfortunately the change in the Western world is often only on the surface. Women may have legal rights but that does not protect them from being humiliated and attacked.
The women in this case said that if she had known what happens to rape victims in that country she would never have reported it. In Australia we take rape victims very seriously and she had not known that she would be the one treated like a criminal.
I was brought up in a Christian family but I could not accept a religion that treats women as second class people. I still refuse to and so I have rejected all of the major religions. I believe that treating women badly is bad for men as well as for women. I do not believe that things will get better during my lifetime. If anything I think things will get a great deal worse before there is change. I now believe that maybe the sci fi writers were correct and we will have a major social collapse with civil war destroying everything before things start to get better. I hope I am wrong, but if I am right I have no wish to see it happen.
@tarachand (3895)
• India
6 Jun 11
I think that she did right by reporting it, other women who may one day venture into such countries must be made aware of, must be cautioned about the shortcomings in the law of such Islamic nations and the blatant partiality towards adherents of Islam, and towards the male.
I agree that a lot of countries practice equality on the surface and very few women have power even in the Western world. South Asia and Israel have been leading the way with woman empowerment- we have a number of cases where the leaders of the nation have been women. In India, in Sri Lanka, and even Islamic Pakistan. I think in India, if one neglects the fact that it is a woman - Sonia Gandhi who actually controls the strings and the incumbent Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is just her puppet, more than 25 percent of the population lives in states that have women Chief Ministers, and I am talking about population numbers like 300 million - almost the population of the United States. Incidentally, the most powerful democracy in the world -the US had to wait for more than 2 centuries before a woman wielded some sort of power that Hilary Clinton does. The UK did have Margaret Thatcher, and the present German Chancellor is a female, as are some Queens who are more of figure heads and hold that position by the fact that they belong to a royal lineage and not necessarily because of they were elected or were capable , but the Western world has a along way to go.
Kudos to Australia too for the incumbent female head of state Julia Gillard.
1 person likes this
@JenInTN (27514)
• United States
30 Mar 11
I think it's very sad. It is unfortunate that there are places that don't appreciate a woman as a person. It saddens me to think of women suffering such degrading and soul killing situations. I watched a documentary for a class I took on some teens that lived in Saudi Arabia and I was touched by the bravery of their youth. It is called "Life in Saudi" and it was televised on MTV. I hate MTV but my professor insisted it was an eyeopener. There weren't any of the issues that you are talking about addressed, but it was unreal what they have to deal with. You might find it on youtube if you want to see. I think the young adults in the film may have got in trouble later for the film.
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@sharra1 (6340)
• Australia
30 Mar 11
There are a lot of places like that in the world. The problem with idealised images of women where the real women are suppressed is that they simply become property of men. Since men make the laws and police them they also tend uphold the rights of men over women.
It is not that long ago that the police would not interfere in domestic violence. It was the husbands home and he could do as he liked. We have only changed our laws about this becuase people demanded change. It is much harder to demand change when you can go to prison for any critical comments.
Ideally it sounds great. The women say they are protected and feel safe etc but in practice the ideal is never met because men are not ideals they are real and many men use their power to abuse those they can. Humans seem incapable of following ideal and putting them into practice. It often comes down to power is the only force that works.
