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Should Rapists Be Hanged on National Television?
Between examining the profile of a sexual offender in Egypt and rallying against sexual predators, an Egyptian member of parliament proposed a law that allows broadcasting the hanging of rapists live on television.
Nawara Negm of Tahyyes found the idea appalling:
My first and foremost fear is that an invisible hand insists on making a mountain of a mole and that there is no rape phenomenon in Egypt in the first place. I mean that even if a newspaper writes about one rape case every day in a country of 80 million then this is not called a phenomenon. Proportionately speaking there is a statistic that says that there are 20,000 rape victims in Egypt annually, the majority of whom refuse to file a complaint. If you divide 20,000 by 80 million, the percentage is 0.025 and this negates the reasoning behind the phenomenon and the social epidemic. As if the media did not scare people out of their wits, now they want to totally freak them out by airing the hanging of rapists. In whose best interest would that be?
Nawara makes another point saying:
People will definitely sympathize with the rapist … and that's not the end of it; this idea might even enrage thousands of young men who would rape thousands of women in anger and defiance … this is what happens to human beings when you strip them off their humanity and treat them like dogs. And what's behind this people discipline thing? Why does it sound as though those 80 million are a mere flock of cattle … what happened to solving people's problems and rehabilitating offenders?
Currently many girls in Egypt would rather get married to the rapist than live in shame; Hayat wrote:
A working girl in the district of Amreya in Alexandria saved two human werewolves from the rope by agreeing to get married to one of them and dropping all the rape charges against both of them. The investigations proved that those two unemployed men kidnapped and raped her, and after their arrest they both pleaded guilty until the defendant changed her statement and got married to one of them.
[Hayat wonders] how could this girl do such a thing and how would an unemployed rapist be fit for a husband? What if he divorced her later? And where is the public's right to a safe and secure society with rapists getting married to their victims to dodge punishment? Is that a “Rape me and marry me” Campaign?
Posted by Marwa Rakha, Global Voices
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/04/13/egypt-should-rapists-be-hanged-on-tv/
