Broken Ugandan Judicial System: 13 year-old girl abducted, raped, jailed and forced to marry her attacker!
Key Words: Uganda Law Society (ULS), Uganda Penal Code, Rape, Defilement, Age of consent, Patriarchy, Gender Equality, Child Rights, Rape Victims, Gender Discrination, Sex Offences.
A forthnight ago, we wrote about the Uganda Law Society (ULS) lending its professional weight to a law that would criminalise abducted children as young as 15 years old forced into child-soldiering by the Lord's Resistance Army. Our ire was raised by the fact that ULS knows these children are victims of the state that failed to protect them and the insurgents that abducted, trained and deployed them to commit despicable acts.
In discussing the issue, we thought that it was ridiculous, because the ULS knows very well it is a war crime to recruit, coerce and deploy anyone younger than 18 into armed conflict. How could they be talking of children as young as 15, being responsible first, for being abducted by the insurgents; and second for being trained and deployed to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity while in the ranks of insurgents. Moreover, the state that failed to protect them from abduction is esculpated.
We thought it was absurd and nothing could rationalise their motivation except that the male dominated Ugandan society was motivated by something elsewhere related to age. There is socmething in economics that they call price signalling. For instance, when oil prices go up, transporters and manufacturers also mark up their sale prices. In other words, an increase or decrease in the cost of one component, will signal a comparative domino effect of either increase or decrease in costs and prices of related inputs and supplies dependent on such independent factor of production.
Now, back to the Ugandan judicial system, the Uganda Law Society, and Ugandan legislators, with respect to minimum age of responsibility. We wrote then that, these guardians of patriarchal privileges in Uganda, had their eyes on the minimum age of consent for legal sex with minors than wanting to vindicate human rights by punishing violators. According to the Uganda penal code, the age of consent is 18. The males in ULS hope that by deploying legal arsenal to lower minimum age of responsibility, it will eventually have equalising impact elsewhere, particularly on the minimum age of consent, similar to price signalling in business and economics.
Our suspicion has more than been confirmed by the case of a 13 year-old girl who was abducted, forcibly confined and repeatedly raped in Uganda. Instead of her abductors going to jail, she was instead jailed. Every sane person should have been enraged, and more so the men and women within the Ugandan judicial system, and members of the Uganda Law Society. It seems we would be expecting too much from a country that hollers that women's rights have so been uplifted thanks to the revolutionary NRM/A and dictator Yoweri Museveni.
As the Daily Monitor reported today, the girl is finally out of jail after securing bail. However, her trouble is not over. Now here is our outrage: while the law recognises she was raped and defiled, she too apparently------just like the LRA minors, is a victim and a perpetrator! Imagine!
You do not believe it when they say the law is an ass? You might be a believer once you hear this obscure and silly law on defilement in Uganda. Apparently, under the Uganda Penal Code (amended) on defilement, there are‘simple defilement’ and ‘aggravated defilement.’
The girl victim of abduction, rape and unlawful confinement is charged with simple defilement, while her predatory attackers, are charged with aggravated defilement. The ass is that, under the amended penal code Article 129 (A) provides that children under the age of 18 will also be jailed if they have sex with their fellow minors. Berfore the amendment, the act simply provided that “Any person who has sex with a person under 18 years would have committed a felony called defilement."
It seems as if the Ugandan men at the judiciary and their allies in parliament, and of course the Uganda Law Society, were not happy with the old provision that left intra-generational sex between and among minors uncriminalised. It is as if to say, if they dirty old men cannot prey on minor children, then children and adolescent sex should be outlawed so that it is even. That is, if the adults cannot have it with children, then children ought not to have it with children their age.
This is not simply a bad law, it is a thoughtless one that the law society and legislators should have struct down. And I am wondering where are the Ugandan federation of women Lawyers, the national organisation of women, and child rights fraternities in Uganda? Don't they see that there is a gender bias in this penal code amendment, similar to the same penal code that provided that only women could commit adultery, but not men? The equalisation of that discriminatory treatment of the sexes was a progressive one, but it cannot be equated with the thought and act that, a minor who is raped and defiled by a minor of the same age, similarly defiles the other, the predator, the rapist-----perhaps passively?.....because the perpetrator is also a minor!
I am yet to think of a shred of the legal, moral and social logic in this law.
This law is simply dumb, and everyone involved with it, including legislators, the judicial system, and the Uganda Law Society, do not deserve their respective monikers of learned and honourable fellows, because they come across as dumber than the law they helped put on our penal books. Even more outrageous is the fact that the attorney general and the Uganda Law Society and the judicial system would turn a blind eye to the young, orphaned victim being married of to her rapist, all in the name of patriarchal Ethiopian Oromo tradition.
Intra-generational sex should be allowed, and any unwanted sexual advances, and forcible intercourse should be treated for what they are: sexual harassment and rape, regardless of the age of the perpetrator and the victim. And, defilement, should be precisely defined as sexual intercourse, with or without consent, with a minor, when the pepertrator is at least of majority age or much older than the victim or cross-generational.
Adolescents below majority age should not be criminalised for having sex with other adolescents their age. But where sex is unwanted and not consented to among this group, it should similarly be treated as rape but not defilement, unless one of the parties is below puberty and much much younger than the other for it to be treated as consensual and normal curiousity for that age group.
However, not by any stretch of the imagination or some form of perverted legal equity shoud a victim of rape and defilement, be criminalised for having been raped, as if to say, short of killing your attacker before they forcibly have carnal knowledge of you, you also commit rape and defilement, once you are raped!
Simply stupid, to say the least. If anything, it shows that the Ugandan judicial system is broken, and those gatekeers of the rule of law and legal order, are not as learned as we should think: they are thick, unimaginative, one-dimensional creatures.
Where is Maria Matembe with those shears?
A forthnight ago, we wrote about the Uganda Law Society (ULS) lending its professional weight to a law that would criminalise abducted children as young as 15 years old forced into child-soldiering by the Lord's Resistance Army. Our ire was raised by the fact that ULS knows these children are victims of the state that failed to protect them and the insurgents that abducted, trained and deployed them to commit despicable acts.
In discussing the issue, we thought that it was ridiculous, because the ULS knows very well it is a war crime to recruit, coerce and deploy anyone younger than 18 into armed conflict. How could they be talking of children as young as 15, being responsible first, for being abducted by the insurgents; and second for being trained and deployed to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity while in the ranks of insurgents. Moreover, the state that failed to protect them from abduction is esculpated.
We thought it was absurd and nothing could rationalise their motivation except that the male dominated Ugandan society was motivated by something elsewhere related to age. There is socmething in economics that they call price signalling. For instance, when oil prices go up, transporters and manufacturers also mark up their sale prices. In other words, an increase or decrease in the cost of one component, will signal a comparative domino effect of either increase or decrease in costs and prices of related inputs and supplies dependent on such independent factor of production.
Now, back to the Ugandan judicial system, the Uganda Law Society, and Ugandan legislators, with respect to minimum age of responsibility. We wrote then that, these guardians of patriarchal privileges in Uganda, had their eyes on the minimum age of consent for legal sex with minors than wanting to vindicate human rights by punishing violators. According to the Uganda penal code, the age of consent is 18. The males in ULS hope that by deploying legal arsenal to lower minimum age of responsibility, it will eventually have equalising impact elsewhere, particularly on the minimum age of consent, similar to price signalling in business and economics.
Our suspicion has more than been confirmed by the case of a 13 year-old girl who was abducted, forcibly confined and repeatedly raped in Uganda. Instead of her abductors going to jail, she was instead jailed. Every sane person should have been enraged, and more so the men and women within the Ugandan judicial system, and members of the Uganda Law Society. It seems we would be expecting too much from a country that hollers that women's rights have so been uplifted thanks to the revolutionary NRM/A and dictator Yoweri Museveni.
As the Daily Monitor reported today, the girl is finally out of jail after securing bail. However, her trouble is not over. Now here is our outrage: while the law recognises she was raped and defiled, she too apparently------just like the LRA minors, is a victim and a perpetrator! Imagine!
You do not believe it when they say the law is an ass? You might be a believer once you hear this obscure and silly law on defilement in Uganda. Apparently, under the Uganda Penal Code (amended) on defilement, there are‘simple defilement’ and ‘aggravated defilement.’
The girl victim of abduction, rape and unlawful confinement is charged with simple defilement, while her predatory attackers, are charged with aggravated defilement. The ass is that, under the amended penal code Article 129 (A) provides that children under the age of 18 will also be jailed if they have sex with their fellow minors. Berfore the amendment, the act simply provided that “Any person who has sex with a person under 18 years would have committed a felony called defilement."
It seems as if the Ugandan men at the judiciary and their allies in parliament, and of course the Uganda Law Society, were not happy with the old provision that left intra-generational sex between and among minors uncriminalised. It is as if to say, if they dirty old men cannot prey on minor children, then children and adolescent sex should be outlawed so that it is even. That is, if the adults cannot have it with children, then children ought not to have it with children their age.
This is not simply a bad law, it is a thoughtless one that the law society and legislators should have struct down. And I am wondering where are the Ugandan federation of women Lawyers, the national organisation of women, and child rights fraternities in Uganda? Don't they see that there is a gender bias in this penal code amendment, similar to the same penal code that provided that only women could commit adultery, but not men? The equalisation of that discriminatory treatment of the sexes was a progressive one, but it cannot be equated with the thought and act that, a minor who is raped and defiled by a minor of the same age, similarly defiles the other, the predator, the rapist-----perhaps passively?.....because the perpetrator is also a minor!
I am yet to think of a shred of the legal, moral and social logic in this law.
This law is simply dumb, and everyone involved with it, including legislators, the judicial system, and the Uganda Law Society, do not deserve their respective monikers of learned and honourable fellows, because they come across as dumber than the law they helped put on our penal books. Even more outrageous is the fact that the attorney general and the Uganda Law Society and the judicial system would turn a blind eye to the young, orphaned victim being married of to her rapist, all in the name of patriarchal Ethiopian Oromo tradition.
Intra-generational sex should be allowed, and any unwanted sexual advances, and forcible intercourse should be treated for what they are: sexual harassment and rape, regardless of the age of the perpetrator and the victim. And, defilement, should be precisely defined as sexual intercourse, with or without consent, with a minor, when the pepertrator is at least of majority age or much older than the victim or cross-generational.
Adolescents below majority age should not be criminalised for having sex with other adolescents their age. But where sex is unwanted and not consented to among this group, it should similarly be treated as rape but not defilement, unless one of the parties is below puberty and much much younger than the other for it to be treated as consensual and normal curiousity for that age group.
However, not by any stretch of the imagination or some form of perverted legal equity shoud a victim of rape and defilement, be criminalised for having been raped, as if to say, short of killing your attacker before they forcibly have carnal knowledge of you, you also commit rape and defilement, once you are raped!
Simply stupid, to say the least. If anything, it shows that the Ugandan judicial system is broken, and those gatekeers of the rule of law and legal order, are not as learned as we should think: they are thick, unimaginative, one-dimensional creatures.
Where is Maria Matembe with those shears?
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