Yeah, but I’m saying that how do you know she got raped because she accepted a ride? For all we know, she might have known the men who raped her. I’m just saying that if you live somewhere as dangerous as Saudi Arabia, sometimes there is no good choice. It’s the society that’s fucked up, not her choices.
It’s like saying that in pre Civil Rights era South it was just a horrible place to be black, and it sucks, but if a black man made advances towards a white woman, he’d get himself lynched, and that’s just the way it is. I think if a society has no concept of human rights violations that blaming what should be innocuous actions is just too creepy.
I don’t and it doesn’t matter. I don’t know that, other than fleeing, there IS a good resolve for this, but it’s something you know damn well you have to live with.
It’s nothing like that at all; there were people in this country actively interested in changing the way the South operated, some of them were actually IN the south.
Murder and rape, even then, was illegal in America, though none of the good ol’ boys would actually be charged with lynchin’ it was on-the-books illegal and the victims of the crimes were victims only at the hands of their assailants, not of the justice system TOO.
Your last comment goes to my point about human rights. If a woman can choose what to put ON in the morning, whatever country she lives in, is so far beyond the pale when it comes to human rights, she’s better off leaving.
Not sure if this has been addressed, but how can we be sure that things happened they way she reported or “confessed”?
It’s possible that she did hitch a ride with some dude because she wanted to have sex with him, and then, after she got pregnant, claimed rape.
The “punish her because she was raped” laws are stupid, but in this particular case, how do we know she was indeed raped?
If anyone has links to a website with more details on the story, it might clarify things. As is, most of my search results point back to that Saudi Gazette story.
ETA: Of course, people will object to punishing people for adultery, so even if it wasn’t rape, she shouldn’t be punished or sent to jail. But this is a different debate than the more ridiculous case of being punished for being raped.
The Wiki page I provided is actually for the homicide rate, rather than the murder rate. Much less variation.
Anyway, the point is that Saudi Arabia is a remarkably safe place, for the most part.
Since (presumably) this is a fairly rare occurrence (ie., 1 incident per year or less) it doesn’t really factor in to whether either country is “safe”.
As a general rule, unmarried Saudi women don’t know many men who aren’t related to them, or are close enough family friends to be practically related. It’s highly unlikely, IMHO, that the man wasn’t a stranger. The original charge was actually for accepting the ride in the first place- it’s a violation of the Saudi law on segregation of the (unmarried) sexes.
And I’m sure there are women who want things to change in Saudi, but I don’t think it’s all that easy for them, considering how they punish women for perceived crimes. But you wouldn’t think less of someone in Europe who looked at the U.S. and shrugged and said, “That’s just the way things are–if you don’t like using separate water fountains and getting killed for being uppity, just leave?”
I’m not entirely sure that I’d feel any better about a justice system that failed to punish an (obviously guilty) rapist relative to one that punished a rapist and his victim. Either one is totally unacceptable.
I’ve been thinking this over, and I’ve come to the conclusion that you two are right, and I was wrong.
Sigh . . . overall, I’m fine with religion. I really am. But this shit in SA and with Islam in general has been bugging me over the past couple of years. I can’t reconcile the claims to it being a religion of peace with what I’ve been seeing in SA, Afghanistan, Pakistan (especially fucking Pakistan), and any number of countries where Islam has taken over. And that’s not counting the rising antisemitism in France and England. I realize that most Muslims are probably fine. They just want to be left alone and live their lives, but on a larger level Islam’s problems have started to show, and they are not trivial. At this point, I’m not sure they’re even solvable.
I’m not a fan of Islam myself, but this “hey, how come Islam isn’t denouncing this?” meme is getting really tiresome.
Saudi Arabia is dominated by Wahabists, who practice what amounts to the most reactionary form of the faith. Suggesting that Saudi Arabia is representative of Islam in general is just silly.
What are these problems, and why are they so insoluble? Societies evolve. Guess what? Christians used to be douchebags, too. Eventually, the more fanatical Muslim states will realize that they take their faith way too seriously, just as Western Europeans did during the Enlightenment. It would be nice if it happened tomorrow, but just because it won’t doesn’t meant it never will.
The thing is, for something to be a representative, it has to speak out. It’s not enough to be a majority. “Representation” is not just a matter of statistics.