Meet Lama.
Well, actually, you can't meet her, because she's dead. So let's talk about her and remember her and see if we can't come up with a way to prevent what happened to her from happening to anyone, anywhere, EVER AGAIN.
Her father was worried that she wasn't a virgin, so he savagely beat her and raped her. She arrived at the hospital with a crushed skull, broken bones, burns and burns. Her rectum had been torn open and then her father had tried to burn it shut. It took ten months for her to die from these horrific injuries. DID I MENTION THAT SHE WAS FIVE-YEARS OLD!
Horrified? Offended? Sickened? Good, you should be, let's continue. The brilliant legal system in Saudi Arabia gave the man who did this to her, less than a year in prison and a fine. Not a huge fine, mind you, because it wasn't as though she was a son, after all.
Have you chocked on your own bile in anger yet?
Just what the hell are the priorities of the world? If an oil field had been metaphorically raped, tortured and murdered, there would be troop movements and calls to eliminate evil in the world and patriotic chest thumping from the so-called developed nations. However, the most coverage I have seen about this is in the blog community of the progressive and atheist community. Worse yet, it's not an isolated event. Horrific child abuse like this occurs in every country. Talk to a family court lawyer sometime and you'll be sickened by what's going on in your own city.
Every instance of child abuse should be reported every day in the most graphic detail until people start to pay attention. Every institution, whether it be religious or political or community that covers up such abuses, should be exposed as being part of the problem.
Don't report “some priest has been convicted of several accounts of child sexual abuse”. Instead report, “this specific priest shoved his penis up the anuses of this many boys and forced them to masturbate with him while reading child-porn.”
And don't say, “church officials are looking into discipline.” Report the truth and say, “church officials are passing this around the various levels of their hierarchy and hoping it will go away while the faithful are still giving money to this organisation so they can continue to let sexual predators live in our communities.”
Spare me about “religious freedom” and how we can't possibly offend all the peace-loving people of any faith by exposing the sickness of their beliefs. Don't tell me that “those are just the extremists, not us” because the fact of the matter is this: your being not being offended is not worth THE RAPE AND TORTUROUS MURDER OF A FIVE-YEAR OLD GIRL ARE STILL HAPPENING!