The Latest Indian Rape Outrage

A 10-year-old Indian girl was raped and impregnated. A court denied her an abortion.

Derek Hawkins, July 20, 2017 5:19 am. (The Washington Post)

A court in India on Tuesday ordered a 10-year-old girl whose parents say she was raped and impregnated by her uncle to carry her fetus to term, ruling she is too young and her pregnancy too advanced to have an abortion.

The girl, who has not been identified, is six months pregnant and sought medical attention after her maternal uncle allegedly raped her several times, CBS News reported.

The district court in the northern city of Chandigarh based its decision on an opinion by a panel of doctors from the city’s Government Medical College and Hospital, where the girl was examined, according to the hospital’s medical superintendent.

"If you abort then the risk to life is greater,” the superintendent told The Washington Post in a brief phone interview Wednesday.

A 1970s law in India known as the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act bars abortions beyond 20 weeks, though courts have made exceptions if the fetus is not viable or if the mother’s life is at risk.

According to CBS, the hospital’s eight-member panel determined that the fetus was viable and could survive even if it was delivered immediately. CBS quoted an unnamed senior doctor on the panel who said abortion was “not an option at this stage."

The hospital told the Times of India on Tuesday: “The victim is six months pregnant, as revealed by her ultrasound reports. We have submitted our medical advice to the court regarding termination of the foetus."

The girl’s parents found out their daughter was pregnant after she complained of stomach pains, according to the Indian Express. She later reportedly told her mother that her uncle had raped her a half-dozen times when he visited the family home. The uncle was arrested, and the parents petitioned the court for an abortion, the Indian Express reported.

In the USA, These Men Would be Jailed as Sex Offenders

Legalized pedophilia.  Sick cultures.  Even sicker than ours.  How low can we go?

Caption:  In this photo provided on Friday Feb. 10, 2012 by World Press Photo, the 1st prize Contemporary Issues Stories category of the 2012 World Press Photo contest by Stephanie Sinclair, USA, VII Photo Agency for National Geographic magazine shows Tahani (in pink), who married her husband Majed when she was 6 and he was 25, posing for this portrait with former classmate Ghada, also a child bride, outside their mountain home in Hajjah, Yemen, June 10, 2010. Nearly half of all women in Yemen were married as children. (AP Photo/Stephanie Sinclair, VII Photo Agency for National Geographic Magazine)

Do you know what happens to a girl who has a baby when she's 12, 13, 14, 15 and her body is still growing and not yet ready for childbirth? 

(1) A girl's pelvic girdle isn't wide enough for childbirth.  That means often times, after long (several days) and extremely painful labor contractions as the girl's uterus attemps to expel the fetus, she and the fetus die before it's ever born.  If she does deliver the baby, it might be stillborn or severely brain-damaged due to oxygen cut-off during delivery.  Often the girl experiences uncontrolled bleeding due to internal ruptures and dies from blood loss.

(2) Extremely young mothers have a higher risk of pregnancy-induced high blood pressure known as preeclampsia, and their babies are at risk for fetal growth restriction. 

(3)  If a young mother and the baby survive the birth, she may be plagued with "obstetric fistula."   Even physically mature women often experience urinary incontinence for a time after giving birth, but it usually clears up as her body recovers from the rigors of pregnancy and childbirth and through special exercises designed to strengthen the pelvic girdle.  In a young girl where those muscles have been stretched beyond their limit, or torn and not surgically repaired, this doesn't happen.  Think of a rubberband that has lost its elasticity - that is what happens.  If this happens to a girl (and it often does when the body is not mature enough to experience the rigors of childbirth) she will be plagued with health issues for the rest of her life -- if she isn't killed by infection.

Obstetric fistua has become something of a cause celebre in some African countries where westerners have gone in and made television specials on the subject, but in truth, any girl anywhere who is not physically mature enough to go through the rigors of carrying a fetus to term and then childbirth can experience obstetric fistua. Take a good hard look at the girls in the photo at the beginning of this posrt.  Do either of them look old enough to be having sexual intercourse, let alone becoming pregnant and giving birth?  Look at the expressions on their faces.  Would you want YOUR eleven year old to look like that?  These girls don't even have breasts yet.

Perverted, sick, evil.  In the United States and most civilized countries around the world, these men would be jailed for years as child molesters.  Sick societies and cultures condone such things.  We are a very sick world, indeed.

Victimizing Children and Women: 101

From Yahoo News
Lawyer: third woman alleges mass rape of children
AP – 14 hrs ago

VIENNA (AP) — The lawyer for two women who claim they and other children were systematically raped in a public foster home says a third woman has come to him with the same allegations.

Johannes Oehlboeck says that woman additionally asserts that two children died of physical or sexual abuse at the Vienna home.

The two sisters who originally made the accusations in a weekend newspaper interview say the abuse occurred in the 1970s. The institution is now closed. Oehlboeck said Tuesday the third woman spoke of similar acts in the late 1940s and early 1950s, during her time in the Schloss Wilhelminenberg home.

The sisters allege the abuse began when they were 6 and 8, and ended in their early teens.

Marianne Gammer, the head of a victims' aid organization, says psychologists find the sisters' claims plausible.

18 October 2011 Last updated at 05:31 ET

Spain's stolen babies and the families who lived a lie

By Katya Adler BBC News, Spain

Manoli Pagador recalls her first-born child being taken away

Spanish society has been shaken by allegations of the theft and trafficking of thousands of babies by nuns, priests and doctors, which started under Franco and continued up to the 1990s.

I first met Manoli Pagador in Getafe, in a working-class suburb of Madrid. She was attending a meeting for people affected by the scandal Spaniards call "ninos robados" - stolen children.

She has three daughters and lots of grandchildren, but she has never got over the loss of her first-born - a son - nearly 40 years ago.

She had come to think she was crazy for believing he was alive, instead of dead and buried as hospital doctors had told her.

"Now," she said, gripping my hand tightly. "Look around the room at the other women here. All like me. The same background. The same experience. I'm not mad and my family finally believes me."

How many? More than 900 cases are being investigated, but new cases are still coming to light - lawyers say the total could reach 300,000

How long? Over a period of 40-50 years, beginning under Franco, up to the 1990s

Who benefited? Initially the Fascists by bringing up the children of their enemies - later children were taken from parents judged to be morally or economically deficient and placed with approved Catholic, often childless, families

Why did it take so long to expose? The Church and medical profession are highly respected, and Spanish law does not require the biological mother's name on the birth certificate

From Yahoo News
Mexican drug cartels recruiting Texas children
By Jim Forsyth | Reuters – 10 hrs ago

 

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - Texas law enforcement officials say several Mexican drug cartels are luring youngsters as young as 11 to work in their smuggling operations.

Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told Reuters the drug gangs have a chilling name for the young Texans lured into their operations.  "They call them 'the expendables,'" he said.

McCraw said his investigators have evidence six Mexican drug gangs -- including the violent Zetas -- have "command and control centers" in Texas actively recruiting children for their operations, attracting them with what appears to be "easy money" for doing simple tasks. "Cartels would pay kids $50 just for them to move a vehicle from one position to another position, which allows the cartel to keep it under surveillance to see if law enforcement has it under surveillance," he said. "Of course, once you're hooked up with them, there's consequences."

McCraw said 25 minors have been arrested in one Texas border county alone in the past year for running drugs, acting as lookouts, or doing other work for organized Mexican drug gangs. The cartels are now fanning out, he said, and have operations in all major Texas cities.

This month, "we made an arrest of a 12-year-old boy who was in a stolen pickup truck with 800 pounds of marijuana," he said. "So they do recruit our kids."

McCraw says the state of Texas is joining a program initiated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection called "Operation Detour," in which law enforcement officers meet with children and their parents in schools and at community centers to warn them about the dangers of what appears to be the easy money the Mexican drug gangs offer.

Law enforcement officers say children are less likely to be suspects than adults, are easily manipulated by relatively small sums of money, and face less severe penalties than adults if arrested.

Last month, Texas officials released a report indicating Mexico-based drug gangs are intent on creating a "sanitary zone" on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, and are "intimidating landowners" in south Texas into allowing them to use their property as "permanent bases" for drug smuggling activity.

(Editing by Corrie MacLaggan and Jerry Norton)

From Today's Zaman

Cacho: Turkey transit route for human trafficking

25 September 2011, Sunday / YONCA POYRAZ DOĞAN, İSTANBUL

 

Lydia Cacho, the first woman in Mexican history to trail an organized crime ring involved in child pornography and trafficking women, arrived in Turkey in mid-September to receive her award from the Hrant Dink Foundation.

She has interviewed hundreds of victims of human trafficking around the world, including Turkey, and has put her life at risk for her investigative work. She has written several books about the issue and has been honored by many prestigious institutions, the most recent being the Hrant Dink Foundation, established in 2007 after the Jan. 19, 2007 assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Cacho came to Turkey two years ago and stayed for a month to investigate human trafficking. As she followed the trail of the Russian mafia, she discovered that it had links to the British mafia and that Turkey is a transit route. “Turkey is very similar to Italy, where the mafia is well-known and intertwined with the state. Drug dealing in the mafia is controlled by the state in both Italy and Turkey,” she told Sunday’s Zaman in an interview in İstanbul. She told the story of a Croatian woman to demonstrate how women, especially young ones, are conned. “A pretty 17-year-old woman from Croatia was hired to provide some nursing assistance to an elderly woman in İstanbul. But upon arrival she was put in a small house downtown and they told her that she no longer had a job and should pay for her trip back through prostitution. She was exploited every day and, after six months, an immigration officer came to raid the brothel with police and she told me that one of the policemen in the raid was a client. She was then deported back to Croatia,” she said. After interviewing women around the world, Cacho wrote the book “Slaves of Power: A World Map of Sex Traffickers.” She also interviewed many women’s rights activists and academics in Turkey while writing the book. “Many female academics in Turkey do great academic work, but I am surprised that there is not a big women’s movement here. They all told me that they know women trafficking is a big problem in Turkey, but why isn’t that issue in the media?” Cacho asked, adding that it is obvious that women’s studies departments at universities have increased in Turkey, but young women are not yet political. “Young women are not politically visible,” she said in regard to Turkish women, as opposed to women in her home country of Mexico. She noted that 8,000 women and girls are being sold as slaves in Mexico a year. The drug lords in Mexico and Colombia are not just involved in drug dealing, she said, they are also involved in the trafficking of women. “They are making more money from selling women than selling drugs,” she added. About her connection to investigating the trafficking of women, Cacho said she has some early childhood memories. “My mother told me when I was as young as 7 years old not to go to certain places in the city to avoid getting abducted,” she said, but she has no personal attachment to the issue beyond being a curious journalist. She has been imprisoned for her work and faces continued threats on her life. “A month ago, I received an email and phone call threatening me. I used to have three federal agents protecting me day and night. One mobster wanted to kill me, so the government gave me protection, but I was suspicious that the agents might be involved in the mafia so I have no guards anymore. I take care of myself. I take safety precautions all the time,” she said. Cacho’s work has touched many people’s lives. She founded a high security shelter for battered and sexually exploited women and children in Mexico. Defamation laws were also decriminalized after she was jailed when one of the pedophiles she named sued her. Because of her work, new laws were passed against sex trafficking and child prostitution and pornography in Mexico. Cacho stepped into the public spotlight after exposing a pedophilia ring in Cancún, Quintana Roo, with her book “Los Demonios del Edén” (Demons of Eden). Cacho became renowned for both her refusal to back down from those in power and her staunch defense of freedom of the press. Her latest book “Slaves of Power” was released in Mexico last September and in only seven months the book has been translated into French, Italian, German, Swedish, Croatian, English, Dutch and Portuguese and has also been published in Spain, Argentina and Colombia. It will soon be published in Turkey and Japan. She is a member of the Red Internacional de Periodistas con Visión de Género (International Network of Journalists with a Vision on Gender), which is dedicated to addressing gender issues within journalism. Big reaction to Hrant Dink’s assassination in Mexico Lydia Cacho recalls that Mexican journalists and the Armenian population in Mexico reacted strongly to Hrant Dink’s assassination, which remains unsolved after almost five years. The public prosecutor recently linked a cell of Ergenekon -- a clandestine underground network accused of inciting chaos and plotting to overthrow the government -- to the defendants in the case. However, Dink family lawyers point out that the prosecutor has still not called for testimonies from a significant number of public officials to determine their involvement in the preparation and perpetration of the Dink murder or their efforts to conceal and tamper with evidence afterwards. Dink, founder and editor-in-chief of the Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, had become a target for the General Staff after writing an article. He was charged with “insulting Turkishness” and sentenced to six months in prison, despite an opposing expert opinion, and became a target of negative mass media propaganda. The Hrant Dink Foundation states that the International Hrant Dink Award is presented to “individuals, organizations or groups that work for a world free of discrimination, racism and violence, take personal risks for their ideals, use the language of peace and, by doing so, inspire and encourage others.” This is the third year that the award has been given on Dink’s birthday, Sept. 15, when it was presented to the Taraf daily’s Editor-in-Chief Ahmet Altan and Mexican journalist Cacho. “I first received an email over the summer and replied that I knew Hrant Dink. It was so magical that I published my book and then got the award,” Cacho said.

Divorced Before Puberty

From The New York Times

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 3, 2010

It’s hard to imagine that there have been many younger divorcées — or braver ones — than a pint-size third grader named Nujood Ali.

Nujood is a Yemeni girl, and it’s no coincidence that Yemen abounds both in child brides and in terrorists (and now, thanks to Nujood, children who have been divorced). Societies that repress women tend to be prone to violence.

For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”

Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.

Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.

He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son.

Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.

“I want to talk to the judge,” the book quotes Nujood as forlornly telling a woman in the courthouse.

“Which judge are you looking for?”

“I just want to speak to a judge, that’s all.”

“But there are lots of judges in this courthouse.”

“Take me to a judge — it doesn’t matter which one!”

When she finally encountered a judge, Nujood declared firmly: “I want a divorce!”

Yemeni journalists turned Nujood into a cause célèbre, and she eventually won her divorce. The publicity inspired others, including an 8-year-old Saudi girl married to a man in his 50s, to seek annulments and divorces.

As a pioneer, Nujood came to the United States and was honored in 2008 as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Indeed, Nujood is probably the only third grader whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described as “one of the greatest women I have ever seen.”

Nujood’s memoir spent five weeks as the No. 1 best-seller in France. It is being published in 18 other languages, including her own native language of Arabic.

I asked Nujood, now 12, what she thought of her life as a best-selling author. She said the foreign editions didn’t matter much to her, but she was looking forward to seeing it in Arabic. Since her divorce, she has returned to school and to her own family, which she is supporting with her book royalties.

At first, Nujood’s brothers criticized her for shaming the family. But now that Nujood is the main breadwinner, everybody sees things a bit differently. “They’re very nice to her now,” said Khadija al-Salami, a filmmaker who mentors Nujood and who translated for me. “They treat her like a queen.”

Yemen is one of my favorite countries, with glorious architecture and enormously hospitable people. Yet Yemen appears to be a time bomb. It is a hothouse for Al Qaeda and also faces an on-and-off war in the north and a secessionist movement in the south. It’s no coincidence that Yemen is also ranked dead last in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index.

There are a couple of reasons countries that marginalize women often end up unstable.

First, those countries usually have very high birth rates, and that means a youth bulge in the population. One of the factors that most correlates to social conflict is the proportion of young men ages 15 to 24.

Second, those countries also tend to practice polygamy and have higher death rates for girls. That means fewer marriageable women — and more frustrated bachelors to be recruited by extremists.

So educating Nujood and giving her a chance to become a lawyer — her dream — isn’t just a matter of fairness. It’s also a way to help tame the entire country.

Consider Bangladesh. After it split off from Pakistan, Bangladesh began to educate girls in a way that Pakistan has never done. The educated women staffed an emerging garment industry and civil society, and those educated women are one reason Bangladesh is today far more stable than Pakistan.

The United States last month announced $150 million in military assistance for Yemen to fight extremists. In contrast, it costs just $50 to send a girl to public school for a year — and little girls like Nujood may prove more effective than missiles at defeating terrorists.

Forced Marriage and Child Rape

Yemni girl, 12, dies in painful childbirth updated 11:31 a.m. EDT, Mon September 14, 2009 By Mohammed Jamjoom CNN AMMAN, Jordan (CNN) -- A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children's rights group said Monday. Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children. "Although the cause of her death was lack of medical care, the real case was the lack of education in Yemen and the fact that child marriages keep happening," said Seyaj President Ahmed al-Qureshi. Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year, al-Qureshi said. Child brides are commonplace in Yemen, especially in the Red Sea Coast where tribal customs hold sway. Hodeidah is the fourth largest city in Yemen and an important port. More than half of all young Yemeni girls are married off before the age of 18 -- many times to older men, some with more than one wife, a study by Sanaa University found. While it was not immediately known why Fawziya's parents married her off, the reasons vary. Sometimes, financially-strapped parents offer up their daughters for hefty dowries. Marriage means the girls are no longer a financial or moral burden to their parents. And often, parents will extract a promise from the husband to wait until the girl is older to consummate the marriage. Children's organization UNICEF issued a statement Monday saying: "Child marriages violate the rights of children in the most deplorable way. The younger the girl is when she becomes pregnant, the greater the health risks for her and her baby. "Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s. Child marriage denies girls of their childhood, deprives them of an education and robs them of their innocence." "More must be done to address the underlying causes in order to prevent tragic deaths like those of 12-year-old Fawziya and her baby," the statement added. The issue of Yemeni child brides came to the forefront in 2008 with 10-year-old Nujood Ali. She was pulled out of school and married to a man who beat and raped her within weeks of the ceremony. To escape, Nujood hailed a taxi -- the first time in her life -- to get across town to the central courthouse where she sat on a bench and demanded to see a judge. After a well-publicized trial, she was granted a divorce. The Yemeni parliament tried in February to pass a law, setting the minimum marriage age at 17. But the measure has not reached the president because many parliamentarians argued it violates sharia, or Islamic law, which does not stipulate a minimum age. [Very interesting. We all know the mullahs can read anything they want into the verses of the Qoran, but they can't find a principle that says you don't "marry" and rape 12 year old children?] Read more: 10-Year Old Child bride gets divorced after rape, beatings Child bride's nightmare after divorce In the United States, people are sent to prison for raping 12 year old girls. A pre-teen, let alone a teenager, is not physically ready to give birth although she may be menstruating. That doesn't mean one is a 'woman'. Bones are growing, the pelvis is usually yet too narrow to properly support a pregnancy let alone give birth. This is a horrible form of child abuse and yet it is permitted because of 'culture?' That is DISGUSTING.