Mission & Justice

Editorial: 27/8/08

There have been several cases reported recently of young girls, some as young as seven or eight, being married off by their parents to men in their 50s, 60s or even older. In some instances, parents are literally selling their daughters to older men purely for financial reasons —- to settle debts or to gain a substantial dowry for their own use. The practice is repugnant. Young girls are being treated as potential sex slaves, commodities to be bought and sold at whim to satisfy the lusts of old men. It has to be stopped. The Grand Mufti has spoken against it and so too has the Saudi Human Rights Commission (HRC). Only this week, the head of the commission, Turki Al-Sudairi, called on the Saudi authorities to put an end to these marriages. There are several issues at stake in what is incontestably a human rights violation.

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Joshua Arlo; 27/8/08

Homicide arising out of domestic arguments between husbands and wives is a prevalent offence in the community and must be met with a very stern sentence, National Court judge Justice Panuel Mogish said. The judge said this last Friday when sentencing Nicholas Aia Aisi, a 54- year-old grandfather and father of eight, to 10 years in jail for killing his wife. He hit his wife when she was trying to save her daughter from being beaten with a bamboo by Aisi. The killing occurred on June 4, 2007, when Aisi came home drunk and a domestic argument started. “This woman was your wife, the mother of your children, entitled to your respect and support and protection.

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Caroline Overington; 25/8/08

Victoria moved this week to legalise abortion, a development that frankly surprised many people. Isn’t abortion legal, and hasn’t it been for years? As it happens, no. In Australia’s three most populous states - Victoria, NSW and Queensland - abortion is a crime. That is to say, it is part of the Crimes Act, and has been for more than 150 years. Women in all states and the Northern Territory can get a legal abortion, but only if a doctor agrees that the woman will come to some kind of ill-defined physical, social or mental harm if she continues with the pregnancy. Only in the ACT is abortion available on demand. That is, to any woman who wants one, pretty much on request. That, at least, is the law. Now the practice: there are about 83,000 abortions a year in Australia and many are subsidised by Medicare. It is claimed that one in three Australian women will have an abortion in their lifetime (figures are ill-defined, since data is rarely kept).

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Leslie Cannold; 24/8/08

They’ve done it again. For the third time scientists have found evidence that the contraceptive pill maybe inhibiting women’s capacity to conceive - in more ways than one. Worse, it may be playing havoc with their love lives. The most recent findings, in this month’s Proceedings Of The Royal Society, show that women who take the pill have an altered sense of smell. Specifically, they delight in the scents of men who have a similar - rather than complementary - immune system.

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Paul Toohey; 23/8/08

As Marcia Langton and Germaine Greer this week bickered about the cause of the violent rage inside Aboriginal men, that rage was asked to take a seat in the dock of the Northern Territory Supreme Court. The name of the rage was Gary Aaron Albert, 32, described by the judge as a “full-blood Aboriginal man” from Katherine. Albert’s rage took perverse and cruel aspects. On August 4 last year at the Jilkmingann community near Mataranka, after Albert had drunk 18 cans of beer, he started thinking his girlfriend was having thoughts for another man. Albert took a can of spray deodorant, lit a lighter and blowtorched the woman’s leg until it blistered. That was not just rage. It was torture. The victim of the rage was Natasha Daniels, a young woman from a big family from Ngukurr, on the banks of the Roper River, in east Arnhem Land. She lost a job she had held for four years as a ranger because of the constant brutality dealt out by her boyfriend.

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Leslie Cannold; 22/8/08

Abortion is back in the news, with a bill now before the Victorian Parliament that, if it becomes law, will give women with problem pregnancies of less than 24 weeks the right to decide for themselves.
Whenever abortion is at issue, questions about the place of men in the debate loom large and unspoken. What role do men play in political and personal discussions about termination, and what role — morally speaking — should they play? The facts are simple. Men dominate the politics of abortion in the same way they do all other issues. One source claims that 77% of anti-choice leaders are men. And male religious leaders such as the Pope (through the Vatican’s membership of the United Nations) have significant influence on global reproductive health policy. Even on the pro-choice side, where most leadership roles are held by women, men have been critical to the success of campaigns that give women the right to decide.

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Randeep Ramesh; 22/8/08

An ancient custom in Nepal of worshipping a virgin girl-child residing in a palace as a “living goddess” is set to be scrapped after it was branded outdated by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the “deity” must go to school. Religious authorities are searching for a new Kumari — chosen from a handful of three-year-olds — after it was revealed the current living goddess would retire this year. The process looks likely to be scrapped after the country’s highest court accepted arguments that keeping a girl locked up in a medieval palace in the capital, Kathmandu, breached her rights.

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Patricia Karvelas; 22/8/08

Women should have equal representation with men on a new national Aboriginal representative body that is membership-based but has no power to spend taxpayers money, a leading indigenous lawyer has argued. Perth-based human rights lawyer Hannah McGlade, in a submission on the design of the new body, says affirmative action would ensure issues of violence against indigenous women were on the agenda.  Ms McGlade says the greatest failing of the axed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was the disempowerment of indigenous women, and “the fostering and promotion of a male dominated and discriminatory culture of leadership that denied (and thereby … entrenched) the realities of endemic violence and abuse in Aboriginal Australia”.

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20/8/08; See: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1013163.html

A member of the Modesty Guard, a group of ultra-Orthodox men working to eradicate so-called immodest behavior in Haredi areas, has detailed in a rare interview an organization that enjoys the support of rabbis and the police. The Modesty Guard has existed in some form since the establishment of the State of Israel, and is suspected of recently stepping up its violent acts. While it claims its focus is on advocacy, members have been recently been accused of breaking into homes, violent assault and forcing women to move to the back of public buses

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Adil Salahi; 20/8/08

Question. Despite what your writers say, there is enough evidence in the Qur’an to support the requirement that women should cover their faces when they go out. When someone tries to prove a different viewpoint, the argument becomes one of language. Unfortunately there are many people who try to persuade women not to observe the Islamic values and teachings. Thus they become a means used by Satan to lead people astray. If we look at many Muslim countries today, we find this to be common in many areas. The proper way to counter this is that women should fully observe the Islamic dress code. Emran Khan
Answer. The first thing we would like to point out is that we will always explain the Islamic point of view, without hesitation or alteration. We believe that every thing Islam legislates is for the benefit of the individual and society. There is nothing in Islam that is contrary to human nature or serves any interest other than human interests. Indeed, Islamic legislation is geared to bring out the best in man. We need not feel shy or ashamed about anything in Islam.

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