Male Monsters -- Girl Buried Alive for Being a Girl and the World ShrugsPeter Daou
Political consultant, former adviser to Hillary Clinton
Posted: February 5, 2010 11:14 AM
***Trigger Warning***
Guardian:
Turkish police have recovered the body of a 16-year-old girl they say was buried alive by relatives in an "honor" killing carried out as punishment for talking to boys. The girl, who has been identified only by the initials MM, was found in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a two-meter hole dug under a chicken pen outside her home in Kahta, in the south-eastern province of Adiyaman. ... Media reports said the father had told relatives he was unhappy that his daughter - one of nine children - had male friends. The grandfather is said to have beaten her for having relations with the opposite sex. A postmortem examination revealed large amounts of soil in her lungs and stomach, indicating that she had been alive and conscious while being buried. Her body showed no signs of bruising.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/04/girl-buried-alive-turkey
First, let me say this: the brutalization of women and girls cuts across all religious and cultural boundaries, so this isn't just about dis-'honor' killings, though few things are more heinous than a father murdering his daughter (after dispassionately discussing it with other family members). It's about the things males do to females and will continue to do unless the outcry is loud enough that the world begins to take notice.
In a December post, I made a painfully easy prediction: women would have another horrible decade. I gave a few examples.
Like this:
Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore. Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair. "We don't know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear," said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo's rape epidemic. "They are done to destroy women."
And this:
13-year old Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was stoned to death in Somalia by insurgents because she was raped. Reports indicate that she was raped by three men while traveling by foot to visit her grandmother in Mogadishu. When she went to the authorities to report the crime, they accused her of adultery and sentenced her to death. Aisha was forced into a hole in a stadium of 1,000 onlookers as 50 men buried her up to the neck and cast stones at her until she died. A witness who spoke to the BBC's Today programme said she had been crying and had to be forced into a hole before the stoning, reported to have taken place in a football stadium. ... She said: 'I'm not going, I'm not going. Don't kill me, don't kill me.' "A few minutes later more than 50 men tried to stone her." The witness said people crowding round to see the execution said it was "awful".
And there's so much more...
SNIP
...Sometimes I feel like we were all born into an alternate universe, a psychotic, twisted, perverted version of what life should be. Our existence is marked by unimaginable violence, hideous acts of evil against the most innocent among us. It's like living in a perpetual horror movie.
Setting aside the existential conundrum, one thing I know for certain: we can't stop jumping up and down, screaming at the top of our lungs, donating money to organizations that help women, telling our friends and families, doing everything in our power to stop these male monsters from continuing their savagery against women and girls.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-daou/male-monsters---girl-buri_b_450959.html