Neither is the idea of killing your own daughter, sister, or wife. You seem to think that, in a society with very strong family ties, such decision will be as easy of having a glass of water. You should try harder to identify with the pressures that this culture puts on the men as well as the women.
"Strong family ties"? Strong but hardly strongly loving, or nurturant, it's fair to conclude. It's some ghastly species of strength that I wouldn't be bragging about, given its manifestations.
Here's the disgusting story of 9 year old Sanariya -- only one of thousands like it, of course. I was able to find it again, having read it 3 months ago, by putting the following memorable terms from it into google:
"I don't sleep" "teddy bear" nightmares girl raped bleeding operation brothers beat daily bamboo sister kill
Rape (and Silence About It) Haunts Baghdad
Neela Banerjee
New York Times
July 16, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 15 — In her loose black dress, gold hairband and purple flip-flops, Sanariya hops from seat to seat in her living room like any lively 9-year-old. She likes to read. She wants to be a teacher when she grows up, and she says Michael, her white teddy bear, will be her assistant.
But at night, the memory of being raped by a stranger seven weeks ago pulls her into its undertow. She grows feverish and has nightmares, her 28-year-old sister, Fatin, said. She cries, "Let me go!"
"I am afraid of the gangsters," Sanariya whispered in the twilight of her hallway. "I feel like they are killing me in my nightmares. Every day, I have these nightmares."
Since the end of the war and the outbreak of anarchy on the capital's streets, women here have grown increasingly afraid of being abducted and raped. Rumors swirl, especially in a country where rape is so rarely reported....
...Sanariya's four brothers and parents beat her daily, Fatin said, picking up a bamboo slat her father uses. The city morgue gets corpses of women who were murdered by their relatives in so-called honor killings after they returned from an abduction — even, in some cases, when they had not been raped, said Nidal Hussein, a morgue nurse...
...They will get only six months in prison and then they are out."...
Sanariya's family took her to a doctor three days after her attack only because the bleeding had not stopped. She had been sitting on the stairs at about 4 p.m. on May 22 when an armed man dragged her into an abandoned building next door. He shot at neighbors who tried to help the girl. He fled when she began screaming during the assault.
Her mother refuses to let her outside now to play. Fatin lied to her family and said an operation had been done to restore Sanariya's hymen. But when her eldest brother, Ahmed, found out otherwise, he wanted to kill Sanariya, Fatin said.
Out of earshot of her family, Sanariya said she feels no better now, two months after the attack. "I don't sleep at night," she said in the hallway. "I don't sleep." |
