HT: All Things Beautiful.A New South Wales Supreme Court judge has rejected a claim by a Sydney gang-rapist that his strict Pakistani upbringing meant he did not know his actions were wrong.
Justice Peter Hidden has today sentenced two Sydney brothers, who can only be known as MSK and MAK, for a range of sexual assaults against two teenage girls at the brothers' home in Ashfield in 2002.
The brothers are already serving lengthy sentences for the gang-rape of two other teenage girls and MSK will now serve up to 28 years in jail, and MAK will serve up to 19 years.
MSK claimed his family's strict moral and cultural upbringing in Pakistan explained his offences, which has angered one of his victims, Tegan Wagner.
"This wasn't about culture, this is about abuse against women and the fact that they had the nerve to bring in culture to begin with just astounds me," she said.
A violent gang rapist should have been given a lesser sentence
partly because he was a “cultural time bomb” whose attacks were inevitable, as he had emigrated from a country with traditional views of women, his barrister has argued. MSK, who, with his three Pakistani brothers, raped several girls at their Ashfield family home over six months in 2002, was affected by “cultural conditioning … in the context of intoxification”, Stephen Odgers, SC, told the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal yesterday.
when he mouthed "I'm sorry". According to the SMH;
Ms Wagner laughed and gave him the finger. When the court adjourned, she stood up, faced him and said: "F--- you! Go to hell, mate."
"I've been waiting four years to do that," she said. Now 18, Ms Wagner then
took the extraordinary step of allowing her identity to be made public. Outside court, she said: "I'd like to say, have fun in prison, boys. I won."
The terrible reality is that MSK is right (in Spanish, I translate only a part of it):While the use of the "Islamic" defense for gang rape is obviously ludicrous (Islam does not sanction rape), modern Islam, particularly how it is practiced and integrated into tribal societies, is brutal and does not hold women in high esteem (at least from my decadent, morally bankrupt, Western Crusader point-of-view). Women who have sex (as well as men) outside of marriage are to be whipped 100 times (from "The Light" 24.2), while adulteresses get stoned (Sunnah, Translation of Sahih Bukhari, Volume 2, Book 23, Number 413).
In some parts of Pakistan, the sexual assault -rape included- is officially authorised as a legitime way to implement the system of social values.
The Council of a little village ordered reciently that 5 teenagers should be "kidanpped, raped or murdered" because their negative to be treated as material things.
Their ages were between 6 and 13 when they were married against their will to pay a family debt, There is also the case of Mukhtar Mai: when it was presumed that her brother, aged 12, had comitted an offense in a little agricultural village, the council ordered his sister should be group-raped. So, she was carried to a hut where she was raped by four men repeatedly.
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, there were 804 cases of these type of rapes officially orchestrated in 2000 and 434 of them were group-rapes. But the worst thing is that the victims of these atrocities chould commit suicide, because the victims of rape are an irreparable damage to their families.
So when MSK committed the rapes he was only perpetuating his own cultural inheritance. He is proud of a society in which the sexual violence is officially condoned and used commonly as a tool to subdue the women even more.