Here's an example of an American man convicted of one count of forcible rape and two counts of second-degree rape who received NO jail time:
Let's look at the lead charge and the sentence, taken verbatim from the order of sentence: "Count I- Twenty (20) years in the State Penitentiary, split sentence, to serve two (2) years in [a community-based program], balance suspended and placed on three (3) years supervised probation." Yes, you read that right. It essentially says: Twenty years in prison -- except that it will be zero years, and none of it in prison.
The victim was just 13 years old at the time the rapes began. She didn't tell anyone about the repeated rapes, initially, because the rapist threatened to kill her if she did and she believed him.
Are we going to start calling the US an "inhumane regime" because of this incident?
You must distinguish a between a country and its government.
Funny you mention "rape" since part of the crimes against humanity Assad and his thugs have committed is raping Syrian women. What a bunch of sick animals!
Syria Has a Massive Rape Crisis
Syria Has a Massive Rape Crisis
Syrian refugees carry their children in the Al- Zaatri refugee camp, in the Jordanian city of Mafraq, near the border with Syria on February 12, 2013. (Muhammad Hamed/Reuters)
One day in the fall of 2012, Syrian government troops brought a young Free Syrian Army soldier's fiancée, sisters, mother, and female neighbors to the Syrian prison in which he was being held. One by one, he said,
they were raped in front of him.
The 18-year-old had been an FSA soldier for less than a month when he was picked up. Crying uncontrollably as he recounted his torture while in detention to a psychiatrist named Yassar Kanawati, he said he suffers from a spinal injury inflicted by his captors. The other men detained with him were all raped, he told the doctor. When Kanawati asked if he, too, was raped, he went silent.
Although most coverage of the Syrian civil war tends to focus on the fighting between the two sides, this war,
like most, has a more insidious dimension: rape has been reportedly used widely as a tool of control, intimidation, and humiliation throughout the conflict. And its effects, while not always fatal, are
creating a nation of traumatized survivors -- everyone from the direct victims of the attacks to their children, who may have witnessed or been otherwise affected by what has been perpetrated on their relatives.
In September 2012,
I was at the United Nations when Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide shook up a fluorescent-lit room of bored-looking bureaucrats by saying that what happened during the Bosnian war is "repeating itself right now in Syria." He was referring to the
rape of tens of thousands of women in that country in the 1990s.
"With every war and major conflict, as an international community we say 'never again' to mass rape," said Nobel Laureate Jody Williams, who is co-chair of the
International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict. [Full disclosure: I'm on the advisory committee of the campaign.] "Yet, in Syria, as countless women are again finding the war waged on their bodies--we are again standing by and wringing our hands
."
