We hear horrible things all the time.
If you watch the news, read blogs or keep up with current events, you can find, without difficulty, things that make you sick.
I read one such thing Sunday evening — in fact it was one of the worst I have ever read.
The phrase “makes me sick” is almost so clichéd that it doesn’t really express what the words literally mean or what I mean because I physically wanted to throw up.
What I read in Al Arabiya News was this: A young Moroccan girl had been raped, forced to marry her attacker and then, when she bravely filed for divorce, her rapist attacked her and cut her 50 times with a razor.
I just described it in a sentence, but I still have difficulty even comprehending it.
Some news outlets have decided to show a picture of this young girl, laying in her hospital bed covered in bandages.
It evokes such emotion in me that I would consider justice for this man — or rather this thing, man is too human — to consist of throwing him into a pit of tigers rather than standing in some courtroom.
Imagine living in a world where you have to marry your rapist.
Your rapist.
You are attacked, violated, humiliated and harmed.
In the place of justice, you receive a twisted perversion of an intimate union of marriage.
What sort of place that must be.
What a horrible, disgraceful place.
But, unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened, and I know that other women have suffered similar, or worse, fates.
Similar things have happened and do happen with unsettling frequency in Morocco.
Recently, outrage has led to the repeal of the law that allows rapists to escape punishment, though it isn’t much in full force to begin with, if they marry their victim.
But it seems that these issues stem from deeprooted sexism.
It’s important to note that marital rape was only recently recognized in the United States, and even changing the laws here don’t stop it from happening.
Changing a few words doesn’t change people’s hearts, nor their mindsets, and judges still have the power to utilize this barbaric precedent, as happened in this ?woman’s tragic case.
Something needs to be done.
More effort needs to be put into eradicating the “legal” undertaking of these, what I call, “rape marriages.”
No one should ever have to live through such a nightmare.
There is no doubt that the world is a better place than it was a millennia ago.
But it is people like this woman and the horrible barbarity that is done to them that reminds me we have a long way to go.
I pray to God we get there and soon.
cgerst@indiana.edu
