Saleh Al-Turaiqi Okaz newspaper REPORTS, especially about women, that reveal how our prevailing culture has become so harsh and severe to certain segments of society regularly appear in our newspapers. These reports expose a society that returns the victims of a crime to the custody of the perpetrators. The common belief is that our culture is the root cause of the rising crime rate in the country. The prime example is the story of a young woman who was smuggled out of the country by an expatriate worker. Twenty years ago, a young girl from a rural area was asked by her stepmother to go to a nearby grocery store to buy some essential goods. A Pakistani worker in his 40s found her walking to the store alone and took advantage of her. He brutally raped the girl, who had not even reached the age of puberty. When the girl came back home and told her stepmother what had happened, the woman told her she had shamed the family and her father would go berserk if he knew about the incident. She then forced her to leave to Pakistan with the rapist who in turn fabricated travel documents to prove that the girl was his wife. When the villagers had come to know that the girl had been raped, members of her tribe demanded that her father seek out his daughter and kill her. To pacify them — he had no idea where she had disappeared to — he told them that he managed to trace her, and then slaughtered her. He claimed he had later buried her secretly. At that time, the tribe declared proudly that the killing of the girl had erased the shame. Similar was the story of a deaf woman. Exploiting her hearing impairment and absence of her husband from home, two men removed the air-conditioner and entered the house through the vent before raping her. The woman's husband divorced her blaming her for the crime. In the first case, the girl's father found himself faced with two stark choices — either to kill his daughter or leave his hometown. Both stories are similar and the difference is only in the characters involved. Who is the victim? Is it the girl alone or also her father who would be stigmatized if he did not kill her? Wasn't her stepmother, who —knowing that the jungle law of the tribe would not leave the girl alone — persuaded the rapist to marry her, also a victim? In my view, the father is a victim of the twisted tribal culture. Similar is the case with the stepmother who suspected that the outcome would be slaughtering of the girl unless she intervened and rescued her. The biggest victim however was the girl because society is still trying the victim. We know that rape is a crime. But prosecuting the rape victim is a bigger crime. We used to hear such stories again and again, with only the protagonists changing. Some people would be angry with the rapist. At the same time, they will repeat the rhyme for killing the victim and consider the stepmother's act of sending her to the grocery store as a terrible thing.
