Woman raped and jailed in UAE sues

I think ultimately, the women in UAE lose on this even if the authorities were right. Just sends the message that there is a huge risk to reporting. The woman better have 100% concrete evidence or it's not worth reporting.....really sucks.

 

You recognize it's messed up, but I don't know you recognize how messed up that is.

For one, we're assuming they did a rape kit, which showed no evidence of rape. But, that there isn't enough evidence to prove it doesn't mean it didn't happen. And, you seem to be assuming she is lying just because she wasn't proven to be telling the truth. That isn't logical. She might still have been raped.

Two, the idea that making a rape accusation without being able to prove it equates to an admission of consensual sex is insane. I can understand that they may feel constrained by this Muslim idea of confession, but seriously that doesn't make sense. If you reject the rape assertion, you should throw the whole thing out. She obviously wasn't confessing to adultery.

Third, I don't think this is appreciably different from prosecuting her for being a victim of rape. As a victim, you won't know if the rape kit will prove your rape until it is administered, and it won't be administered until you make a rape accusation. So, you take a huge gamble that the kit will back you up when you call the cops.

I think we've had a problem in the States with under-reporting rapes because reports wouldn't be believed or convictions made. In a system you're describing it must be 10 times worse. Seriously, it's a social problem if your country is going to let rapes be committed so easily and discourage reporting so strongly. If I had a wife or daughter and lived in that country, I wouldn't be happy. If I were a rapist, I'd be having a field day.

 

I don't disagree with anything you said, except that I am under the impression that a rape kit used on time is basically always right.

That doesn't change my stance though. I said that there are two possibilities:

1) If she was raped, that's *****ed up.
2) If she was not, then being jailed is messed up for all involved.

My personal opinion is that she was not raped. I don't have a rape kit, I haven't seen the evidence, and I don't understand why my educated guess is not as good as yours.

According to what Qball said, the part that everyone is pissed about is that I am assuming the police did everything right. I don't get that. The police here have top of the range tools to do their job, they are overstaffed, well paid, and don't have much to do. This is not a case of the US or Europe where there are backlogs of rape kits sitting in police stations. This is a case of the chief of police being able to pay attention to every single reported rape case in the country. This stuff just doesn't get taken lightly here.

A quick google search will show you that, without fail, the police have used a rape kit in every story reported. This story was not reported. It will show that there is no bias towards expats. In fact, you will come across a few articles of Emirati women being in the same situation and faring worse than this, despite there being strong evidence of rape.

If this is about my faith in the judicial system, I have very little. If this is about my agreement with the law, I do not agree with the law. This is about my faith in the police applying the highest level of attention in a case of rape, because I know how important it is to the country, the police, the economy, the residents, the citizens, the culture, and the religion. Notice that I am fully aware that this is not necessarily done out of having a good heart - for all we know, the cops were a-holes. But these things don't fall through the cracks in the UAE.

The only thing that faith leads me to is: if I had to guess if there was actually any rape in this case or not, I would say there wasn't. I would go as far as to say that the level of attention and sophistication normally applied to such a cases in the UAE is leaps and bounds ahead of how it would be treated elsewhere given the investment in technology, the smaller population, and the lower crime rate.

I've read this thread over a million times and I've tried to see it from many angles. It seems we all agree that the law is idiotic, and that we hope this woman wasn't raped, and that if she was raped then jailed for consensual sex, that's a travesty. If she wasn't raped and they were jailed, then it's messed up for all involved. The only place where we seem to disagree is that my educated guess is that she wasn't raped, and I'm basing this on my historical knowledge of how things work in this country, why/when people are biased, the details in articles, and the word on the street.

It's a shame that this tiny part is being misconstrued as me being happy with anything that happened here at all, and I'm convinced that this is the result of some sort of negative perception of the UAE in the international media. I guess they've succeeded. Well f that, I know far more, see way more, and dislike things way more than they do. I speak up when something is messed up, and I wouldn't make an exception, especially not for something as serious as this.

I'm out.

 

The woman claimed that she was drugged. That is not what a rape kit is checking for. A rape kit is for the collection of evidence used to identify the attacker (semen, hair, scrapings from under the fingernails, etc.) and to test for the transmission of disease to the victim. Evidence of bruising, tearing, etc. is also collected at this time.

The toxicology kit is the important one here, not the rape kit. It can be tough to detect things like Rohypnol, and it can be made even more so if there is a homemade concoction or the roofie was mixed with alcohol. Not to mention the fact that there is generally a substantial delay between the administration of the drug and the test (since the woman typically blacks out), during which time the chance to successfully test for anything is lost.

Rape is one of the toughest crimes to prosecute and treating the victim like a criminal only makes the matter 1000 times worse.

 

Thanks, good info. I was wiki-ing the stuff you talked about and also found this:

 

Update:

 

Strange, the faucets at the Le Meridien's I've stayed at have always been up to par. Hot and cold water flow both efficiently and buoyantly. Not everyone has the privilege of growing up with golden faucets like you pippendagimp.

 

Every now and then I'm asked (somewhat seriously) if I would consider working in various locations around the Middle East. Despite my own personal issues with it, I might still go for the experience. But then I think of my wife and daughter (who I would not leave behind) and think..."**** NO".

 

I love how all the Muslim apologists rush in to act like criticizing a backwards culture is a major affront. Cultural relativism is complete crap. Some cultures ARE better than others, and a culture that punishes woman for being raped (oh, sorry, for the crime of "adultery") is not one of the better ones.

 

The root of the issue is that the "cultural" backwardness of certain groups is incorrectly attributed to a religion (Islam). This is what irks me about the posts by ATW. He has succeeded (and partly by fault of some posters with knee-jerk reactions to ATW) in convincing some of you defending Islam is akin to defending sharia rule and the atrocities that go with it or even far fetched as defending terrorism. It was so easy for you to have the word "Muslim" and "Culture" in the same sentence and used interchangeably.

 

Theoretically agree with this post. The problem is in determining how much influence the religion has in maintaining the cultural status quo.

 

History can teach us great lessons. What is different now versus 300 years ago when concepts such as terrorism, jihad, and sharia weren't attributed to Islam. I think the world was at a much leveler playing field in terms of military and economics. The United States changed all that starting in 1900 imo. Industrial revolution coupled with its isolation due to geography kept it out of harms way (relatively speaking of course). The rest of the world was left playing catch-up....some did and some didn't. Due to the resources available in some areas, some countries did get close while others didn't (i.e. oil money was absent from more than half the century). Poor economic conditions and income disparity on a global scale led to growth of extremism in last 60 years until, unfortunately, it finally hit home hard on Sept 11th, 2001.

People tend to forget history very easily.

 

That's quite a shift in goalposts. You went from arguing a cultural legacy to the influence of foreign policy. Inasmuch as US foreign policy has caused a great deal of poverty I agree; however blaming it for cultural attitudes is probably inaccurate. In either case, it ignores my more fundamental question: how much does Islam influence (or maybe benefit) from assuring that this cultural backwardness (as you call it) does not progress? The answer, in my mind, is intuitive, obvious, and supported by historical anecdotes.

That's not to say you are wrong in the above post - poverty is a far greater cause of extremism than religion. See previous posts here and here.

 

You got me wrong. I'm still talkin history not specifically foreign policy. I'm not saying that US foreign policy is the cause of poverty. I'm merely stating that the US put the game on another level. Nothing wrong with that at all. People and govt here made some good decisions for themselves. What I blame in the development of backwardness in certain cultures is the absence of a decent economy rather than the doctrines of a specific religion.

50 years ago we demonized communism to the fullest extent. That "political" backwardness (at least to us it was backwards) was incorrectly attributed to the culture in Russia. Communists and Russians were used interchangeably. Something similar has happened with Islam. Communism is gone now (chinese communism isn't real communism) but the Russian people and their culture are still there. I believe the same will happen with extremism and Islam. The playing field is now once again starting to even out. These countries will see that forcing a woman to wear a burqa in no way improves the quality of life of the people.

 

No real argument, but that still leaves my question unanswered.

 

I don't think that is where you and I disagree. I wouldn't have the faintest idea whether the police did everything right or not. For the sake of this argument, I'll assume they are law-enforcing all-stars.

Where I disagree is when you equate not being able to prove a rape did happen with proving that a rape did not happen. You think she's lying about the rape allegation because the evidence didn't prove her case. It runs afoul of American notions of innocent until proven guilty. I think you (and Dubai) leave it at 'unproven' and not necessarily proceed to 'fraudulent' (though it could ultimately be the case).

I also think you're a bit cavalier about some pretty serious injustices that punishes the victim for being raped. If a woman is a victim, she has to actually win a conviction against her rapist or else go to prison herself? That's more than "messed up;" that's a systemic persecution of women in the fabric of the justice system. You don't even need to legalize adultery to fix that -- just don't assume a rape allegation is an admission of having sex.

 

Russians:Communism :: Muslims(Islam):Extremism

The above is incorrect in my opinion. But you will undoubtly disagree.