Forced marriages: family rape and rape by proxy
by Nicolai Sennels
The fight for and against free speech has entered another round in the Danish courts now that the historian and author Lars Hedegaard is facing a charge of “racism” for his claim that rapes are common in Muslim families.
The fact is that forced marriages are widespread in the Muslim world and marriages are often between cousins. In a forced marriage, the girl is coerced into an involuntary and often lifelong sexual relationship. Therefore, every single act of intercourse in that “marriage” actually constitutes rape.
The families — with fathers and uncles as their powerful leaders — have arranged the marriage and are therefore accomplices in the sexual abuse. Fathers and uncles are thus committing rape “by proxy” — not for the sake of their own sexual satisfaction, but in order to increase the number of family members and thereby enhance their status and economic security, and also to keep alive ancient cultural and religious traditions.
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Which is worse: the cousin who rapes his cousin or the parents who force their daughter to marry?
Just as “family execution” is a better term than “honor killing”, “family rape” is a more fitting phrase than “forced marriage”.
Nicolai Sennels is a psychologist and the author of “Among Criminal Muslims: A Psychologist’s experiences with the Copenhagen Municipality”.
Previous posts by or about Nicolai Sennels:
| 2010 | Jan | 6 | The Eternal Victim | |||
| Feb | 19 | Youths, Crime, and Islam | ||||
| Apr | 11 | The Stigmatization Fallacy | ||||
| May | 8 | Islam Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry | ||||
| Jul | 28 | Nicolai Sennels: An Open Letter to David Cameron |
10 comments:
I've never liked to use the term honor killing; while it's certainly murder, there is no honor in it. The suggestion above -- family execution -- fits the act perfectly. That's what I'll be calling it from now on.
If you were a religious person living in a country where pornography was displayed on every corner next to automatic condom dispensers, wouldn't you take steps to prevent your daughter from marrying a dissolute drunken pervert?
I'm all for exposing Islam's perversions, but this goes one step too far. Forced marriage cannot be qualified, by any stretch of the imagination, as "family rape", or "rape by proxy", which is a ridiculous concept.
There are all manners of gradation between arranged and forced marriage. Sexual intercourse is by no means the only objective and content of marriage. Arranged marriage has existed in many societies, including our own -- I mean Western, Christian societies -- and is not exclusive to Islam. Arranged marriage has long been a service to the bride and groom, as well as to the families.
Arguably, it's a more civilised way of doing things than Meetic, or desperately hanging around in pick-up bars.
Of course, if you consider some extreme cases, such as a little girl in Pakistan being sold to a 50-year old man, I suppose that, yes, you could qualify the ensuing sexual relationships as rape.
But let's not stick recklessly our cultural concepts upon other people's cultures. One can reject the islamisation on the west without using such crude characterisations.
Unless Nicolaï Sennels meant that as some sort of pyschoanalytic metaphor -- but it does not seem to me it was his intention, and maybe we should not mix psychoanalysis with politics, anyway.
Sure, if your religion insists that non-believers are animals, women are third-class citizens (created by the devil to tempt righteous men to sin) and those dissolute, drunken perverts so happen to be responsible for the greatest leaps in technology, science, philosophy, and ever other field of study, possess one of the greatest economic systems ever devised by mortal men, view women as their equals, and revel in the beauty that is human sexuality. Who have, by the way, kicked your stone age level religious butt for over a thousand years and proven themselves to be in every respect superior to you.
So yeah, I could understand why you'd take "steps" to prevent your daughters from marrying them by forcing them into incestuous marriages and killing them.
By the way, I'm being sarcastic. In case "you" couldn't tell.
I object to NorseAlchemist's attack on Orthodox Judaism.
Don’t forget about “Tribal Murder/Justice” honour killings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm5axXThrV4&feature=related
I fail to see where my comments describe Orthodox Judaism. To my knowledge, other than being highly religious, they fail to meet any other qualifier that I mentioned.
Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai (Talmud, Page 651, Soncino edition, book of Baba Mezia, 1l4a-114b.)
Citations without quotes are as useful as bubblegum to C3PO. Please state what your text is supposed to say so that it may be discussed by learned men.
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