Reports that a man in Saudi Arabia, who has appeared on television as a preacher, had raped and tortured to death his 5-year-old daughter have fueled outrage online about the way the legal system works in the conservative kingdom and about the lack of protections for domestic abuse victims.
The man, Fayhan al-Ghamdi, was accused of raping and torturing his daughter Lama, who died from her injuries in October. While Saudi news organizations have reported on the case, over the past week activists in the kingdom have used the Twitter hashtag #IamLama, and its Arabic language equivalent, to draw much more attention to it.
The two female activists behind the campaign, Aziza al-Yousef and Manal al-Sharif, are both known for their efforts to break the ban on driving by Saudi women. Last week, they posted a press release online, in which they expressed dismay at a report that a court had ruled that the prosecution could seek a payment of “blood money†to the girl’s mother, but the time the defendant has served in prison since Lama’s death would suffice as punishment.
As the activists behind the campaign did with the driving issue, in their comments on Lama’s death they have pointed to underlying issues, namely, the tradition of male guardianship, and the way that domestic abuse is dealt with in the kingdom.
Pointing to a report in the Saudi newspaper Al Watan in January, the women wrote:
The ruling is based on a Shariah argument that fathers cannot be executed for murdering their children, nor can husbands be executed for murdering their wives. Fathers and husbands who murder their children or wives are consistently sentenced to five to twelve years in prison at most. This leniency is not extended to! mothers ! and wives. In the history of Saudi Arabia, there has only been one case in 2008 where a father and his second wife were executed for torturing his daughter to death.
The courts’ leniency towards male abusers and murderers reflects the larger problem of the male guardianship system in Saudi Arabia, wherein ALL women are considered minors and are automatically assigned to the care and judgment of their most immediate male relative. This guardianship gives the male relatives the power to sell girls legally into child marriages and to ban adult women from work, travel and obtaining medical operations.
In an interview with CNN this week, Ms. Yousef said that the case had “shocked†a broad spectrum of Saudi society.
The CNN report included footage of one of the man’s appearances as a televangelist, in which he wept over the abuse of a boy.
Wile the Twitter campaign spread awareness about the case inside the kingdom and abroad, it remains unclear, if the ruling on the limits on sentencing reported by Al Watan was final. In a post on the case for The Daily Beast, Bayan Perazzo reported:
it appears that the reports on this ruling were premature. Itmad AlSunaidi, a legal researcher at the Human Rights Association in Riyadh, told Asharq al-Awsat Tuesday that the hearing would begin this week, that no blood money sentence has been issued, and in a crime this big that no sentence would be called in just one session. Al Watan reported that the court session would be on February 5, and that it would be the first hearing where Lama’s mother would have legal representation.
Ms. Perazzo, a professor in Saudi Arabia who blogs about the kingdom for the site Muftah, also noted that Asharq al-Awsat had reported that Dr. Mohammed Mehdi, the medical examiner in Lama’s case, said in an interview that the “offender committed all sorts of physical abuse on the victim†and that the 5-year-old girl suffered from clear evidence of sexual abuse and rape, including “swelling in the region of he genitals and laceration in her anal area.â€
According to Ms. Perazzo, the case highlights “the flaws in Saudi Arabia’s justice system, which leaves the fate of any individual in the hands of the judge. There exists no unified code of punishments in the country, thus similar crimes often result in very different punishments, as long as the judge can find some sort of justification for his decision in Islamic texts. The Saudi government’s very rigid interpretation of Islam also leaves the possibility for these judges to base their ruling in religious texts with very weak sources, which are considered invalid in other Islamic interpretations.â€
The Saudi blogger Eman al-Nafjan, who helped draw attention to the case in a post last week, stressed that activists and the girl’s mother simply want to make sure the father receives an appropriate punishment under the law.
What human rights activists & Lama’s mother want is that Fayhan Al Ghamdi get the maximum punishment. 1/3
â€" Eman Al Nafjan (@Saudiwoman) 4 Feb 13
The case has emerged just as the annual Human Rights Watch World Report, released in January, noted that punishments in Saudi Arabia for domestic violene remained lax.
Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.
Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.
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