It’s not just the conservative Imams of the world who make highly offensive and asinine remarks about women, though they seem to make them more often than others. It’s easy for these religious types to blame women for everything, including being raped. Back in 2006, Australia’s head Muslim cleric Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, caused global outrage when he claimed that women who refused to wear the hijab (veil) were, in essence, asking to be raped and likening them to meat. Al-Hilali stupidly said: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it..whose fault is it – the cats or the uncovered meat? “The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab (veil), no problem would have occurred.”
Now, one of the heads of the Orthodox Russian Church has said something equally offensive and stupid. Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin again has placed all the blame on the way women dress for any potential rape by claiming :“If she (a woman) is wearing a miniskirt, it is provocative. If she is drunk at the same time then she is even more provocative, and if she herself is actively seeking contact with people and is then surprised when that contact ends in rape she is wrong.”
He also wants to create a dress code for the Russian people, claiming that it was not a utopia and people would “have to get used to it.”
I’ll be the first to admit that I find it challenging not to be critical when I see a woman very scantily clad, but both Chaplin and al-Hilali seem to think that rapes are justified for women who do not dress modestly, which is simply outrageous. What a woman wears or does not happen to wear does not give a man the license to rape her, in any way, shape or form. And what about the women in non-Western Muslim-majority countries who get raped? There are plenty of women modestly dressed who get raped and it has nothing to do with showing too much skin. There are just some sick men out there who find the only way to get pleasure is to force themselves on women, and something has to be done to toughen up the rape laws all over the world. And while we’re at it, religious clerics need to condemn the act of rape rather than justify it by blaming it on women.
Sources: DailyMailUK and TelegraphUK
