Thursday, August 16, 2007

Rape and culture   posted by p-ter @ 8/16/2007 05:49:00 PM
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Apropos of the post on sexual charity, I came across this in the "readings" section of Harper's, from a United Nations report called "The Dynamics of Honor Killings in Turkey" [pdf]:
The boy was seventeen at the time and the girl about eleven. He assaulted and raped her. Then, thinking he had killed her, he buried her. Her friends found her. The boy was sentenced to fourteen years in jail. After a while, the girl got well. The boy's family went to the girl's family and said, "We will accept your girl as a bride, but you have to withdraw your case against our son so he can get out of prison." The girl's family thought, Who will want to marry her when she gets older anyway? So they withdrew the case. Now the two of them are married. --female, twenty-two
An anecdote, yes (and possibly a second or third-hand one). But perhaps some evidence that the seriousness of rape is not a constant across cultures.