Blaming the Victim; A Taste of Law After the West By Mrs Vera West
Practicing my Spanish to keep my old brain from becoming too senile, I found this little horror on a Mexican website. It is yet another story of injustice from our perspective. A woman was in her apartment in Doha, and while she was sleeping a man broke in and raped her. When she went to report the case, instead of punishing the rapist, the criminal court released her aggressor and sentenced her to receive 100 lashes and spend seven years in prison for having had an "extramarital relationship" with him. Or, she could marry him, and I think she would have taken the lashes and jail time.
Apparently under that regime, a woman can only have a chance of convicting a rapist, if four men see this. But I suppose if four men were there, there would not be the initial rape, as they might stop it! Talk about Catch 22. The idea that this law would invite rapists to easily work around it, does not seem to matter. Oh, but that is Western cultural bias.
“[Schietekat] works as a behavioral economist for the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, the entity responsible for organizing the Qatar 2022 World Cup.
Her work was interrupted when a man entered her apartment in Doha while she was sleeping and sexually assaulted her. When she went to report the case, instead of punishing her aggressor, she received a terrible response: a criminal court released her aggressor and sentenced her to receive 100 lashes and spend seven years in prison for having had an "extramarital relationship" with him, the man who raped her.
Schietekat is back in Mexico and far from her aggressor, but the legal problems initiated by his complaint continue to take money away from her and the possibility of participating in her "dream job", as she explained in the first person in a recent article where she narrated in detail the violence to which she was subjected:
The Mexican said that in her adolescence she was also a victim of sexual violence and that she wanted to make the complaint with the intention that the same thing would not happen again.
With the evidence in hand, she approached the Mexican consulate in Qatar and explained to the authorities, in the little Arabic she speaks, what happened.
Asking me if I wanted a restraining order, to do nothing, or to go to the last resort, I froze, from shock, fear and lack of sleep, and turned to see the consul, who recommended that I go to the last resort. instances. I signed the statement in Arabic and gave the details of the aggressor. Hours later, at nine o'clock at night, they called me on the phone to urgently go to the police station," the woman said.
The policemen interrogated her in Arabic for more than three hours. It turns out that her rapist had excused himself by claiming that he was her girlfriend, and had given him permission to enter.
In Qatar, having an extramarital relationship is punishable by up to seven years in prison, and in some cases the sentence includes a hundred lashes; that was the sentence that now threatened the victim.
"The solution that my lawyer and the legal representative of my assailant gave me was relatively simple: marry him. To close the case that the State of Qatar opened against me, I only had to marry my assailant."
After months of a judicial process that does not end, Schietekat publicly denounced the Mexican consulate for "the lack of a protection protocol for victims of violence with a gender perspective", which the consul Luis Ancona demonstrated by not informing her that the complaint he recommended doing could come back to haunt you; and to the international community, which "has excused, and even defended archaic monarchies that maintain laws that promote modern slavery", all under "the shadow of great sporting or cultural events".
A final hearing will be held on March 6, where she hopes that a decision will be made that annuls that sentence and thus Schietekat can return to Qatar and resume her work.”
I used Google translator, which completely reversed the genders in this story. More joy of IT!
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