Re: Not Guilty By Reason of Ovaries
- From: warm_hearted_man_passive@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 14 Mar 2006 21:04:48 -0800
connor_a@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Again, if the victim was a baby girl and the nanny was a man the
verdict would have been 25 years of anal sex behind bars.
Exactly. The society of humans is so sexist.
If you think Western society favors females over males, read the
following:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-defile14mar14,0,8...
Going All the Way -- to Jail
A statute in Uganda aims at men who prey on girls and makes such
activity a capital crime. But it is teenage boys who are being
ensnared.
By Edmund Sanders, Times Staff Writer
March 14, 2006
KAMPALA, Uganda - Two love-struck teens. A secret affair. Feuding
families that tear them apart. It has all the elements of "Romeo and
Juliet," Uganda-style.
With her pink-and-white school uniform and shy grin, Maska Justine was
just 14 when she caught the eye of Wakalanga Alex after her family
moved to his middle-class neighborhood in Kampala.
Wakalanga, a slender boy two years older but still too young to shave,
began a flirtation, sending love notes through a mutual friend. Soon
the teenagers were walking home together from school, stealing kisses
when no one was looking. A few months later, Wakalanga asked Maska if
she wanted to "play sex." The young lovers rendezvoused on the dusty
floor of his father's office-supplies kiosk.
Her pregnancy exposed the romance. In most parts of the world, such
delicate situations would be handled privately, between families or
tribes. But after his liaison with Maska became known, Wakalanga was
sent to jail, where he awaits trial. Maska was left pregnant and
heartbroken.
In Uganda, what Wakalanga did qualifies as a capital offense,
technically punishable by death, though no such sentence has yet been
rendered.
The East African nation has one of the toughest "defilement" laws
anywhere when it comes to girls. Spurred by a burgeoning women's
movement and a growing anti-AIDS campaign, Ugandan lawmakers in 1990
made it illegal for any person to engage in sexual intercourse with a
girl younger than 18.
Unlike statutes in most other countries in Africa and the rest of the
world, the law makes no distinction based upon whether the sex was
consensual, or on the age of the alleged "defiler." Boys, however,
cannot be defiled under the law, either by older women or men.
By contrast, in the United States, age of consent under statutory rape
laws varies between 14 and 18, regardless of gender. In some states,
such as California, the offense is only a misdemeanor if consenting
participants are close in age.
The Uganda law was intended to crack down on pedophiles seducing girls
or offering money in exchange for sex, a serious problem throughout
Africa. With AIDS on the rise, older men prey on school-age girls,
believing the risk of catching the disease to be lower. And some men
believed tales that sleeping with virgins could cure AIDS.
But legal experts and children's advocates in Uganda now call the law
misguided.
"We're going about this in the wrong way," said Evelyn B. Edroma,
senior advisor to the Justice Ministry. "We're trying to fight a social
vice. But you can't legislate against primal social behavior."
The law largely has failed to hit its intended targets. "Older men are
buying their way out by paying the families," said Shanti Parikh, a
professor at St. Louis-based Washington University who has studied
sexuality in Uganda.
Instead, the defilement law is ensnaring hundreds of teenage boys like
Wakalanga whose only offense was engaging in sex with their underage
girlfriends. The average age of those arrested is 21.
"These are nothing more than young people finding out about life," said
Geoffrey Odaga of Save the Children, an advocacy group in Kampala that
is preparing to challenge the constitutionality of the law by arguing
it discriminates against boys.
As many as 2,000 boys, most of them poor or abandoned by their
families, are facing defilement charges, according to estimates from
the Legal Aid Clinic in Kampala, which represents children and the
poor. Several hundred are being held in jail or juvenile detention
facilities because they or their families cannot afford bail while they
await trial.
In many of these cases, charges eventually will be dropped.
Although adult men have been given prison sentences as long as 14
years, allegations against boys are usually dismissed when they involve
consensual sex. Frequently, that's because the girls refuse to testify.
(Many young couples, in fact, continue their relationships while the
boys are incarcerated, with girls making furtive visits.)
Nevertheless, boys can find themselves caught up in the legal system
for more than 18 months because Uganda's courts are flooded with
defilement cases.
More than half of all capital cases pending before Uganda's high court
are for defilement. Because of the potential death sentence, only the
high court is permitted to hear them. Due partly to the backlog, the
total number of pending cases has nearly doubled since 2003 to more
than 6,000.
Uganda's prison system is ill-equipped to handle the boys. Despite a
law that prohibits sending children to adult prisons, some boys barely
into their teens spend days, weeks or even months in local jails, mixed
in with killers, rapists and other hard-core criminals. The boys are
often subjected to beatings and rape by the older inmates, putting them
at risk for AIDS.
.
- References:
- Not Guilty By Reason of Ovaries
- From: MCP
- Re: Not Guilty By Reason of Ovaries
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