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Has the world gone stark raving mad?

25th July 2009 by Helena 4 Comments  

I have just read a story on the BBC website that makes me want to throw up. An eight year old Liberian girl in Arizona was lured into a shed, attacked and gang-raped by four Liberian boys aged nine to 14. Her parents have disowned her, saying she has brought shame on the family.

She is in the care of the local authorities who say they have had several offers of help and even adoption. That’s great. But the one person a traumatised eight-year-old girl really needs is her mother. I cannot believe that any mother, whatever her misguided social or religious convictions might be, would be this cruel. I can only assume it is the men in the family forcing her to reject her child.

I can’t stop thinking about the poor girl. What a tragedy. The boys have been arrested and will be punished. I suppose we should be thankful they live in a society where the law is thus. But surely it is time for people like this girl’s family to realise that in a case of rape it is the rapist who should be shunned, and not the victim.

Societies like ours have an obligation to force those who move to our shores to adopt our laws and moral guidelines. Forget being politically correct. Forget about trying not to upset them. This is about what is so obviously wrong against what is right. If they are too ignorant to see it, we have to educate them, for the sake of this little girl and thousands of victims of “honour” crimes across the world.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2009


Filed Under: Human Rights, blog --> Tagged With: raving, stark, world

4 thoughts on Has the world gone stark raving mad?

  • mimi says:
    26th July 2009 at 12:47 am

    I absolutely agree!
    Poor girl, it’s like a double crime against her.
    The idea that this girl has “brought” anything on her family by this crime (of which she is unfortunately the victim) is as bizarre as the idea that somebody “does” something to “deserve” to be raped. This kind of thinking only allows the perpetrators of these crimes, to some extent, off the hook, whether convicted or not.

  • Elisabeth Loesch says:
    26th July 2009 at 6:17 pm

    If you are born a girl on the wrong side of the fence, you might be subjected to all kinds of physical and emotional abuse. Look at the sexual mutilation of young girls in Mali. These are Human Rights issues. If we talk about it, write about it, we might make things progress in the right direction, and hope to see some results in the next century.

  • Melissa Jackson says:
    28th July 2009 at 5:54 am

    Thank you for posting this. It is a shame most people are too disturbed by this sort of sexual/racial abuse to actually address it. I respect that you did. I did a brief post on Congolese rape here: http://belljarmelissa.blogspot.com/2009/04/we-have-to-do-more.html

    Rape is becoming the woman of mass destruction of the future. It spreads disease/death, kills/emotionally destroys the women, dishonors and demoralizes the fathers/husbands and has created an entire generation of “rape babies” who are raising themselves, being discarded by their mothers out of social pressure. This cannot be ignored any longer.

  • Melissa Jackson says:
    28th July 2009 at 11:35 pm

    edit: weapon not woman. haha 🙂

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Helena Frith Powell was born in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Italian father, but grew up mainly in England. She is the author of eleven books, translated into several languages including Chinese and Russian. She wrote the French Mistress column The Sunday Times about life in France for several years. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Tatler Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.

Helena has been the editor of four magazines, including M Magazine, a supplement for the Abu Dhabi based National Newspaper and FIVE, a high-end fashion glossy, also published in Abu Dhabi. Helena was also editor in chief of 360 Life, a quarterly glossy magazine published with the Sports 360 Newspaper in Dubai, part of the Chalhoub Group.

Helena contributes regularly to UK-based newspapers and magazines and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. Helena is also working on a thriller called Thin Ice that will be published in spring 2021 as well as a novel about the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield called Sense of an Echo.

Her latest non-fiction work Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles came out in hardback in 2016 and in paperback in April 2018.

Helena, who was educated at Durham University, lives in the Languedoc region of France with her husband Rupert and their three children.

Bibliography

More France Please, we’re British; Gibson Square 2004

Two Lipsticks and a Lover 2005; Gibson Square (hardback)

All You Need to be Impossibly French; (US version of above) Penguin 2006

Two Lipsticks and a Lover; Arrow Books (paperback) 2007

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (hardback) 2006

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (paperback) 2007

So Chic! (French version of Two Lipsticks) Leduc Editions 2008 (also translated into Chinese, Russian and Thai)

More, More France; Gibson Square 2009

To Hell in High Heels; Arrow Books 2009 (also translated into Polish)

The Viva Mayr Diet; Harper Collins 2009

Love in a Warm Climate; Gibson Square 2011

The Ex-Factor; Gibson Square 2013

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles; Gibson Square 2016

The Arnolfini Marriage; Amazon Kindle December 2016

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles (paperback); Gibson Square spring 2018

The Longest Night; Gibson Square spring 2019

 

 

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