Faulting the Rape Victim
By Dr. Ali Alyami
There can be no greater failure by a system of justice than to punish the victim of a crime. Such a failure does much more than bring injustice to the individual who should be receiving it; it renders totally impotent and irrelevant the system that allowed it. This is so because in order for such a tragedy to come about, the system in question must be based on fundamentally flawed views of morality and criminality. Such is the case with the Saudi system of justice.
Recently, a teenage Saudi woman was raped by seven men, and not only was she punished for being raped, but her punishment was actually greater than that of one of her rapists. This form of justice is not only tragic and reprehensible; it is inhumane by any standard set by religious belief or civil society. A newly wedded 19 years woman, dubbed Bint Al-Qatief, or daughter of the city of Qatif, a Shiite enclave in Eastern Saudi Arabia, went to retrieve a picture from one of her male high school friends so her new husband would not punish and or divorce her if he discovered that another man had a picture of her. While talking to him in a parked car, seven men approached them and raped the woman. Two of them turned around and raped her friend too.
Normally, rapists receive death penalty or life imprisonment. Not in Bint Al-Qatief’s case. The only explanation for the light sentence is that she is from the Shitte Muslim minority who are brutally discriminated against because of their religion. The Saudi judicial system can only be staffed by Sunni (Wahhabi) religious judges who consider the Shittes of Eastern Arabia and the Ismalis of Southern Arabia heretics and infidels.
This is not the only tragedy with the Saudi judicial system when dealing with rape and sexual coercions. Women have very little rights in Saudi Arabia and are generally considered less than truthful. In order for a woman to prove she was raped, she has to have four male witnesses who would testify that they saw the man rape the woman from a close distance. This means that they must be non-participants and see the intercourse in action, or as the Saudi males jokingly refer to it, Al-Meel Fe Al-Makhalah. In the case of Bint Al-Qatief, it would require twenty-eight men to testify that they were only four feet away when she was raped. “The lack of transparency in the investigation, the trial and the sentencing, plus the difficulties that journalists have to get access lead to deep a darkness where everything is possible.” (‘Rape Case roils Saudi legal system’, pg 3, Donna Abu-Nasr, Associated Press, November 21, 2006)