http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/24/in...RAN.html?8hpib
This is so stupid and disgusting that it really makes you question why people say respect the culture. Yeah respect the culture to some extent and then go in and impose your damn will until they realize they're wrong.
-Rudey
--Why don't they just behead the males? It's a part of their culture.
Taken with permission from NYTimes:
A Crime of the Young Stalks France's Urban Wastelands
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: October 24, 2003
IGNEUX-SUR-SEINE, France — The boys were patient, standing in line and waiting their turn to rape.
Their two victims, girls of 13, were patient, too, never crying out, at least that is what the neighbors said, and enduring the violence and abuse repeatedly over five months.
That was three years ago. Late in September, 10 young men, now aged from 18 to 21, were convicted of rape in a closed courtroom in nearby Evry and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to five years. Seven others will go on trial in November.
The fact that they are being brought to justice at all is highly unusual. The phenomenon of gang rape in France is called something more banal: taking turns.
It occurs — how often is unknown — in the concrete wastelands built as cheap housing for immigrants, mostly from France's former colonies, in the 1950's and 1960's on the outskirts of big cities. Here, according to sociologists and prosecutors, teenage boys, many of them loosely organized into gangs, prey on neighborhood girls.
Many of the boys are raised in closed, traditional families and are hopelessly confused or ignorant about sex; others are simply street toughs. In this world, women enjoy little respect; often girls who appear weak, or wear tight-fitting clothing, or go out unaccompanied by their fathers or brothers, are considered fair game.
To avoid trouble, many girls have taken to wearing loose-fitting jogging clothes, and hidden themselves behind domineering fathers or brothers; others have organized themselves into their own gangs. Many of the Muslim girls have donned head scarves — more for protection than out of religious conviction.
In the basement of No. 4, place Albert Einstein, in this working-class suburb where the rapes took place, a scrawl across a white wall explains why so few cases are prosecuted. "The law of silence is our sixth sense," it reads.
"I've heard too many of these stories, and it's become unbearable," said Samira Bellil, 30, a gang-rape victim, whose book, "In Gang-Rape Hell," was a best seller in France last year. "The word of the boys is often believed. So the trauma is not just the violence but the torment that comes if a girl comes forward and breaks the silence. We have to stop taking sides with the wolves."
Ms. Bellil was gang-raped at age 14. She had fallen in love, and agreed to have sex with her boyfriend. Three of his friends were waiting outside. They kicked and beat her and gang-raped her throughout the night. She waited before reporting the rapes, and did so only after three of her friends told her that they too had been raped by one of her attackers.
The appearance of Ms. Bellil's book last year coincided with the death of a 17-year-old girl named Sohane, who was burned alive by an angry boyfriend in the Paris suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine. A book about that murder is still on the best-seller list.
In the recent court case, the assault on the two girls was either oral or anal; vaginal sex would have stolen the girls' virginity, which apparently was not the goal of the attackers.
"In many cases, the violence of a band of young men against a girl is considered a rite of sexual initiation to prove one's manhood," said Hugues Lagrange, a sociologist at the Center for Scientific Research in Paris who specializes in adolescent sexuality. "In the boys' minds, if a girl's virginity is respected, then nothing bad has happened."
The girls' story seeped out months after the events, according to Laurent Le Mehaute, the lawyer for one of the girls. After rumors circulated at their high school, the director got police involved. At first, the girls denied the story, but eventually identified 18 boys as their rapists.
None of the boys had a previous criminal record. All but one confessed to having sex with the girls, even acknowledging that it was not consensual. The one who claimed his innocence was acquitted.
At the vast housing project where the girls lived and where the rapes occurred, the grounds are clean, even landscaped. The population is multiracial and multiethnic, blending both French-born citizens and immigrants from places like North and sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey and the Caribbean. Nearby are a butcher selling halal meat, an oriental pastry shop and coffeehouse, a laundromat, a health club and a supermarket — as well as drug dealers openly selling hashish.
Prejudice against the girls lingers. "What were the girls doing in the afternoons down in the basements?" asked a woman who lives on the first floor of the building. "Why did their parents let them go there? They know what happens if they follow the boys. They know what happens if they go to the basement."
The neighborhood butcher, from Algeria, talked about the suburb as a world apart. "If a girl goes out, she's going to get into trouble, especially with Arabs and blacks, because they are not used to seeing girls outside," he said. "The boys have needs. Where I come from, it's not normal that a girl goes out at night. If I tell my sister not to go out, she obeys me. This world is not like France."
Both the neighbor and the butcher spoke on condition that their names not be used.
There are no reliable statistics, but Mr. Lagrange estimates that there are more than four times as many gang rapes in France today as there were two decades ago; at least part of the increase can be attributed to more young women coming forward.
Transparency comes at an exceedingly high price. After one of the girls spoke out, said Mr. Le Mehaute, the lawyer, "she couldn't go out anymore."
"People spat on her. There was tremendous psychological damage. Both girls felt humiliated, dirty."
The girl's 39-year-old father became so depressed after the truth was disclosed that last summer he hanged himself. The girl had tried but failed to kill herself the year before by slashing her arms. Both girls were harassed so mercilessly that have since moved away from the project. One lives with relatives, the other in state-run housing.