Let's start with this hulking ugly POS and work our way out.
Posted on 01/16/2004 11:18:39 PM PST by freedom44
VIGNEUX-SUR-SEINE, France The boys were patient, standing in line and waiting their turn to rape.
Their two victims, girls of 13, were patient as well, never crying out, at least that is what the neighbors said, and enduring the violence and abuse not once, but repeatedly over five months.
That was three years ago. Late last month, 10 young men, now ranging in age 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 has become banal. It occurs - how often is unknown - in the concrete wastelands built as cheap housing for immigrants on the outskirts of France's 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 who wear tight-fitting clothing or go out unaccompanied by their fathers or brothers are considered fair game.
To avoid trouble, many girls of the projects 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 4 Place Albert Einstein, in this working-class suburb where the rapes took place, a graffiti message scrawled 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 bestseller 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."
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 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 suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine. A book about the murder, which trained the spotlight on violent crime against young women in the suburbs, is still on the best-seller list. In the case of the two girls in the recent court case, the penetration was 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 National 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 referred the matter to the police. At first, the girls denied the story, but eventually identified 18 boys as their rapists.
All but one of the boys 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 with weeping willow and evergreen trees. The population is multiracial and multiethnic, a blend of 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 coffee house, a laundromat, a health club and a supermarket - as well as drug dealers openly selling hashish.
None of the young men, some whose families moved here from the Caribbean, had a previous criminal record.
Prejudice against the girls lingers. "What were the girls doing in the afternoons down in the basements?" asked one 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, spoke as if the suburb was 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."
There are no reliable statistics, but 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 speaking out.
Transparency comes at an exceedingly high price. After one of the girls came forward, said Le Mehaute, the lawyer, "She couldn't go out anymore. People spat on her. There was tremendous psychological damage."
The girl's 39-year-old father became so depressed after the truth was revealed 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 they have since moved away from the project. One lives with relatives, the other in state-run housing.
We are going backwards, folks.
WAAAYYYYYYY too lenient.
Let's start with this hulking ugly POS and work our way out.
Yes ---- this is the code word for Muslims.
This culture isn't becoming coarser and more permissive --- it's been that way since the days of Mohammed --- he raped the widows of the men he murdered. He had a 6 year old girl as one of his "wives" when he was in his 50's.
Not traditional in the sense you mean. See reply # 7.
Dontcha mean muslim ones?
I am still searching for the eventual punishment of the boys as well as major headlines about the incident. Such incidents I have described are not the first in the Dallas area, and, although I realize the hundred or so "root causes" of such behavior, our permissive and coarse cultures find more subdued voices of tolerance of outrageous, evil behavior instead of outraged voices. My first reply was not well-expressed.
Regards, Penny
because we have so many people who have grown up free of want, hunger, and fear, but do not appreciate the sacrifice of those who gave them those freedoms. Because they don't have the courage or character to emulate their betters, they prefer to rewrite the accomplishment rulebook on their own terms. Sure, they might be lousy businessmen, husbands, wives, fathers, girlfriends, you name it, but they hold a set of views which in their peer group makes them someone of value. Cheers, By
Three to five years? And then what? You'll have tough, ex-convict prison survivors with no morals at all, ready to prey on more people. Short prison terms are not a viable solution to this problem. France is in deep, deep denial, and deep, deep s---. The whole country is going straight to hell. Anyone who can get out, should.
Wishing you all the best,
Penny
The same thing was said 25 years ago in South Africa.
People laughed then, too, and Afrikaaners are a lot tougher than French.
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