A woman sentenced by a court in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, after being gang-raped by seven men.
She was handed a sentence of 200 lashes and six months in jail after being found guilty of speaking to the media about the crime and indecency.
Woman punished because she spoke out about her being defiled by 7 men
According to the account of the story reported by the Middle East Monitor, the 19-year-old Shia woman was in the car of a student friend when two men got into the vehicle and drove them to a secluded area, where she was raped by the seven men.
She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in a car of a man who was not related to her.
Commentators say Saudi Arabia’s law dictates that a male family member must accompany a woman at all times in public.
The Press TV reports that the rapists were surprisingly sentenced to five years in prison. And it is unclear why the rapists were handed this light sentence, considering the fact that they could have faced the death penalty.
Lawyer for the woman, Abdul Rahman al-Lahem, appealed to the Saudi General Court after the sentence was handed down.
However, the court reviewed the sentence, increasing it to 200 lashes. The court held that the woman had spoken to the media. The lawyer was also banned from the case; his license was confiscated, and was summoned to a disciplinary hearing.
Such a case is not only peculiar to Saudi Arabia, many women around the world face similar situations.
Back home here in Nigeria, a Senator has said that the gender and equality opportunities bill was turned down by the National Assembly, on the grounds that sections of it will allow women to ignore their marital responsibilities and freely engage in prostitution, lesb*anism and other immoral activities.
And one asks what is truly the rational behind such a statement?
The Chibok girls are still missing two years after their abduction and the question is will they ever be found?
All these deliberations form the basis of this second edition of the Nigerian poets series. Below are poems that lend their voices to the teeming number of Nigerians and people around the world speaking against the ill-treatments meted out to women, as well as other societal ills.
1. On Chibok by Dami Ajayi
Shekau is Jay-Z
singing I’ve got girls, girls, girls, girls.
Pointed rifles and aides flanking him
on CNN.
A neanderthal in turban,
brazen and psychotic,
he holds the world to ransom,
call it terrorism.
He kills in the name of a God
Leaving this god neither anonymous,
nor blameless.
Bombs burst open
in market places,churches, parks, mosques
with seething effervescence.
We condemn his gore and guts
whilst our impotent imperialists masturbate
in clandestine spaces.
The nation grows amok,
anomie twinkling persistent blips.
The nation has been sabotaged
and they wave a flag of indifference,
then a flag of denial, then a flag
of amnesty, a flag of deliberation
in the face of carnage.
Bombs, new land mines,
detonated by strapped suicide bombers.
They die by diffusion and hope to f**k
virgins in heavenly suites.They shout God is great.
But we already know.
Man’s wickedness is greater
and God does not speak for man’s wickedness
when He called us after his image.
God is no poet;
he does not fancy imagery,
he would have said: man, look into a mirror
what you see is God.
Gory images spread across newspapers.
Everyday a new death.
Not famine or
Malaria, not automobile mishap
or Filaria Not old age,
the good death or dying,
Not even cancer, the new worm
or Diabetes, death from being too sugary--
it is suicide motivated multiple homicides.
Happy go lucky bombers
who blast their themselves
in a frenzied rant about the greatness of God.
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Yes, man’s wickedness is greater.
Look into craters and see blood flowing,
tributaries connecting Buni Yad
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