Bus driver molests boy, gets away with it

When I was 11 years old our school bus driver (whose name was Ralph) in Prince Edward Island started letting one of the boys sit on his lap while he drove us all home. He swore us to secrecy because we all knew the boy wasn't supposed to be sitting on the bus driver's lap...

Over a period of a month the bus driver Ralph started molesting the boy, who was about 7 at the time. He started fondling him sexually right in front of us.

We (the older kids) knew that we should be telling our parents, our teachers or the police... but the bus driver knew where we lived and reminded/threatened us. Some of us were also thanking our lucky stars it wasn't us up there on driver's lap being molested. Our previous promise was part of the issue for the smaller children, who were very confused as to what was going on, but for the older kids it was a matter of indecision. We wanted to tell someone but the threat of violence and whether anyone would listen brought serious doubts.

Eventually Ralph became so confident he pulled his penis out of his pants and instructed the boy to stroke it for him. He had to stop the bus at one point because he couldn't concentrate on the road enough.

After that incident myself and several other students went to the principal to complain. Ralph was arrested, but oddly enough never charged. He was fired, shunned in public and people stopped talking to him (or when they did talk it was to shout insults at him).

Ralph eventually moved to British Columbia and we never heard from him again. He was never charged, never listed as a sex offender and for all we know could be driving bus again or coaching baseball for young boys.

The boy, Michael or Mikey, went to psychologists for several years and by the time he was a teenager was a goth and a drug addict. He was messed up for life. Last I heard he moved to Montreal.

My point is thus: Mikey's life was essentially ruined by what happened and Ralph got away with it. I personally still have nightmares about what happened and I'm fairly certain other people involved have been disturbed as well.

What boggles my mind is how Ralph managed to get away scot-free. We had many witnesses and a seriously confused molested boy.

Is that the state of our child protection laws in Canada? That sex criminals get away without even being charged? It makes me sick to my stomach.

Black Womanhood in Art

Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center

Right: DOUBLE FUSE: Wangechi Mutu’s playful razzmatazz makes reference to the past but lives in the present.

“Black Womanhood,” the exhibit at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center, must have seemed like a sharp idea when it was being put together. It examines the ways in which “contemporary artists are challenging historic and often stereotypical images that present black women as the alluringly beautiful Other, the erotic fantasy, or the super-maternal mammy.” By now this is familiar, if still urgent, stuff; what makes this outing special is that it gathers more than 100 objects — traditional African art, Western colonial photos and postcards, and contemporary art — that connect today’s dissectors with the origins of the ugly stereotypes they’re working to take apart.

Barbara Thompson, who organized the show for Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art in New Hampshire, does a good job of mapping the territory. But it’s an uneven show with a dour vision that leaves a mediciny taste in your mouth — and, I think, offers signs of a generation gap among curators.

The art of African women was traditionally pottery, beadwork, basketry, textiles, and the decoration of their own bodies (tattoos, scarification, hairstyles, body paint). But Westerners collected primarily African sculpture, masks, and costumes — which tended to be made by and for African men. The women’s portrayal of themselves was more abstracted, less obvious than their men’s literal, if stylized, depictions of women. The show presents women-made pots with bumps and patterns that make reference to women’s physiques and body scarification. The women’s pieces emerge directly from their work and their rituals — like a leather skirt beaded by an adolescent girl in her seclusion as she made the traditional passage into womanhood.

The most charged part of the show surveys early-20th-century Western photos and postcards of African women. Western attitudes are apparent in images that treated the women as curious ethnographic specimens and pin-ups — either untamed, sexually available African primitives or Oriental harem girls. Photographers tailored their shots to different audiences by photographing the same models elaborately garbed or in various states of undress. A postcard of a young topless Temne woman lounging on a rug was published around 1910 as “Timnie Girl, Sierra Leone.” When it was republished in the 1920s, the caption read, “Just you and me. Sierra Leone.” These postcards could be the foundation of an electrifying stand-alone exhibit.

Right: HOT-EN-TOT: More of the contemporary work should have Renée Cox’s crackle and swagger.

But “Black Womanhood” — primarily work by black women, with some contributions by men and whites — deflates as it moves to the art of today. Sokari Douglas Camp’s 1995 sculpture Gelede from Top to Toe is an African woman turned into an armored tank of steel and chicken wire with wooden breasts that jut out like battering rams. In Renée Cox’s giant 2001 photo self-portrait Baby Back, she imitates Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1814 painting La grande odalisque by reclining, with nothing hiding her brown skin except for red heels, on a gold chaise longue. Cox asks how race colors our notions of beauty, and she teases black-white, male-female hierarchies. Ingres’s naked white lady is an imagined harem girl holding a fan; Cox has a whip.

More of the contemporary work should have Cox’s crackle and swagger. It should sadden, celebrate, anger. You’d think Kara Walker’s bawdy, violent versions of ante-bellum paper-cut silhouettes would be just what this show needs, but the 1997 pop-up book that’s here is too tiny to convey the fierce beauty of her best work.

The then-and-now focus favors artists whose work is built on looking back — but many artists seem hemmed in by their historical references. And the theme pigeonholes art that is more expansive, like María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s 1994 self-portrait When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá. The photo shows her naked body from her chin to her belly, everything painted with blue waves. Slung over her shoulders and hanging over her breasts are a pair of baby bottles. Milk seems to drip from the bottles and her breasts into a simple wooden boat that she cradles. A black Cuban native who lives in Brookline with her white husband and their son, Campos-Pons often makes reference to the African diaspora and traditional African art. But her explorations of motherhood, race, and much else have their own rich mysterious symbols, and they’re planted in the present by her sculptural and symbolic use of hair extensions and beads.

These are highlights among contemporary works that are mostly dull, didactic, and rote — like a 1990-’91 photo from Carla Williams’s How To Read Character series that pairs a diagram of the parts of a cow with a photo of the nude artist. It’s art focused more on being good for you than on engaging you. “Global Feminisms,” a survey of recent international feminist art that was organized by the Brooklyn Museum and appeared at the Davis last fall, was similarly full of dour art. This eat-your-broccoli didacticism seems at least a decade behind the times.

In “Black Womanhood,” that’s partly because much of the newish work is at least 10 years old. But it also seems to represent a generation gap among curators who haven’t picked up on the changes in this area of art over the past decade or so. These curators know black and feminist art of ’80s and ’90s, which often took the form of pared-down didactic critiques. What they’ve missed is emerging women artists and artists of color who while continuing to berate the straight white guys who’ve kept their people down also create exuberant visions of what the future can hold. And they’ve embraced lavish beauty — often for its own sake. Among younger black artists, this trend tends to show up as vivid psychedelic colors, glitter, and patterns and fabrics that make reference to traditional African art as well as ’60s and ’70s Afro soul. These artists remain engaged with the past, but in terms of the themes and styles of their childhoods, when the transformations of the civil-rights movement, feminism, and post-colonialism began to be felt.

The single example of all that here is Wangechi Mutu’s 2003 collage and ink drawing Double Fuse. It depicts weird futuristic glam twins with hands made of motorcycle parts and glittering skin-tight outfits with blond hair as epaulets. The patterns recall African art, but the goofy, cheeky, playful razzamatazz is more about beauty than a comment on the past.

Where are Chris Olifi, Mickalene Thomas, Lorna Williams, Laylah Ali, Saya Woolfalk, Yinka Shonibare, El Anatsui, and the Chicago artist Nick Cave? The show would benefit from flashbacks to Betye Saar’s acid 1972 assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which gave the icon a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other. Or cartoonist Robert Crumb’s notorious ’60s caricature Angelfood McSpade, which was inspired by racist comics of the 1920s and ’30s.

And though it doesn’t fit the show’s then-and-now focus, I wish “Black Womanhood” had a place for pseudonymous Chicago artist Lo (see www.livingoprah.com), who is spending this year following, as closely as she can, the advice Oprah Winfrey gives on her television show and her Web site and in her magazines. If that doesn’t tell us something deep about black womanhood today, what does?

Sarah Palin struggles in unwelcome spotlight on eve of TV showdown

Just because she's a woman doesn't mean she's a feminist or anyone you should vote for. Sarah Palin is a liability, not a benefit.

United States - John McCain’s campaign is putting pressure on the organisers of the vice-presidential debate tomorrow night to go easy on Sarah Palin amid growing alarm that faltering performances in recent days have made her an object of public ridicule.

Yesterday she was at Mr McCain’s ranch in Arizona with some of his most senior advisers, undergoing an intensive programme of preparation for the televised clash with Joe Biden, her Democratic rival.

Only a fortnight ago the Governor of Alaska was seen as a potential saviour of the Republican party, having reinvigorated a previously torpid conservative base with an electrifying speech at the convention in St Paul.

However, after initially being kept away from the media, a series of political gaffes on the campaign trail and an embarrassing interview with CBS have transformed her, politics wise, into a serious liability for Mr McCain.

Nancy Pfotenhauer, a senior campaign strategist for Mr McCain, has asked for fewer questions than might be expected on foreign policy in the debate. Pointing out that Mr Biden – chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations – would have an advantage on such issues, she said that the clash should at least be evenly balanced with domestic concerns. “The moderators will have some questions to answer themselves if they do go so heavy [on] foreign policy.”

In her interview on CBS, Mrs Palin struggled to defend a claim that the proximity of her state meant she was an expert on Russia, was then unable to answer questions about Mr McCain’s achievements in regulating big business and suggested that the military had already won the war in Iraq.

The comedy show Saturday Night Live parodied her as asking if she could “phone a friend” when faced with one question. Some of the biggest laughs, however, came when Tina Fey, the impersonator, used phrases that closely resembled Mrs Palin’s own ramblings.

CBS is said to be planning to broadcast further segments of the interview in which she was apparently unable to name any Supreme Court judgments other than the Roe vs Wade ruling on abortion. An aide said that there was no fumbling on this question, merely silence.

Some conservative commentators have even suggested she be replaced. Kathleen Parker, writing for the National Review, said that her “cringe reflex is exhausted” after watching Mrs Palin exposed so badly. She wrote: “Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does.”

Mitt Romney, who narrowly missed becoming the vice-presidential nominee, is among those who think Mrs Palin has been overly schooled – losing spontaneity and confidence as a result. “I think they’d be a lot wiser to let Sarah Palin be Sarah Palin,” he said. Advisers said that many people would be appalled at the sneering towards her, and opponents patronised Mrs Palin at their peril. “She continues to be a huge asset who speaks directly to the middle American voter that the media so often ignore,” one source said.

Privately, strategists said that at least expectations have been lowered for the debate. Mrs Palin breezily insisted that she looked forward to going into battle with Mr Biden, who seemed “pretty doggone confident – like he’s sure he’s going to win”. She emphasised how long he had been a Washington insider, saying: “I’ve been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in, like, second grade.”

Mr McCain has little option but to stick up for her and declare his pride in his vice-presidential pick. In a joint interview with her he defended comments made at the weekend in which she had once more wandered off-message by supporting cross-border attacks from Afghanistan into Pakistan, like Barack Obama had.

Asked what she had learnt from the experience, Mrs Palin replied: “That this is all about ‘gotcha’ journalism. A lot of it is – but that’s OK, too.”


Borderline humour

Mrs Palin in her own words:

‘Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land-boundary that we have with Canada . . . As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there . . . right next to our state.’

Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey as Mrs Palin:

‘You got Alaska here, this right here is water, and this is Russia. So, we keep an eye on them. Every morning, when Alaskans wake up, one of the first things they do is look outside to see if there are any Russians hanging around. And if there are, you ask, ‘What are you doing here?’ and if they can’t give a reason, it’s our responsibility to say, “Shoo! Get back over there”!’

Saturday Night Live Parody of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton

Feminist Blabble on Facebook

Killing Female Babies in India

BAGHPAT, INDIA - Six years ago, Sandhya Sharma lived in a mountain village in Himachal Pradesh, the land of snowy mountains that is nestled in the western Himalayan range.

Sharma, 26, had never left her village before she was brought here, to the Indo-Gangetic plains of Uttar Pradesh, India's most densely populated state, married to a man whose language and culture were unknown to her.

Sharma talked about the deep isolation she felt immediately after her marriage.

"At first I never spoke to people. When I did, no one would understand me, so I cried a lot," said Sharma as she gently fussed over her year-old twins.

Such set-ups are neither marriages of convenience, nor of choice. But in the northwestern states of Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, such arrangements are on the rise. It's a trend that seems strange in a culture where language, caste and regional identity are so deeply and separately treasured. But take one look at the 2001 national census and the numbers offer an explanation – they reflect the sad saga of the killing of baby girls and aborting female fetuses in India.

As the Indian population has grown, the country's ratio between girls to boys has declined. With a national average of 927 girls for every 1,000 boys, the ratio for children from infancy to age 6 is 798 girls to 1,000 boys in Punjab, 819 girls in Haryana and 916 in Uttar Pradesh, according to the 2001 census of India.

Over 27 per cent of India's 593 districts have an adult population ratio of under 900 females for every, 1,000 males, indicating a long-standing practice of female infanticide and feticide.

That means thousands of men can't find brides in their areas, a shortage that is felt particularly in states where the practice of female infanticide, and now feticide, is practised and accepted.

The British medical journal The Lancet recently estimated that 500,000 female fetuses are aborted each year in India solely because of their gender.

It's hard to tell whether marriages of majboori or helpless compulsion are a rising trend. The stories, to date, are anecdotal, and research on them is limited. But social workers documenting the impact of female infanticide and feticide on society insist that such marriages are on the rise.

"They are importing women from all over," said Davinder Singh Dhamo, who runs the Navodya Lok Chetna Kalyan Samiti, a non-governmental organization that has worked hard to advocate for the rights of girls, and that has fought against ultrasound clinics that are aiding the feticide business.

"In every village there are a few women who have come from far-flung areas – from Assam, from Bihar, and Jharkhand, for example."

Loneliness and culture shock shape the experiences of many of the women who've been traded casually by their families, poor mountain dwellers or impoverished rural folk for whom the spectre of dowry and the lifelong financial burdens it promises ease the crime of selling or sending their daughters far, far away.

Beyond the interstate marriages fixed through personal ties and word-of-mouth, is the more sinister trade in trafficking women, which analysts say, is on the rise. Dhamo has a vault full of horrific tales about women sold off through auctions. Among them is the tale of Sonia, a young woman from Banaras who was sold for $1,000 before a sea of curious faces.

The business in trafficking women for marriages wouldn't be thriving quite so much if female feticide and infanticide were under control. In April, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh termed female feticide "a national shame."

"The practice (of female feticide) is rising and it's all about money," said Sabu George, a researcher and activist who has worked in this area for several years.

"There are increasing numbers of doctors getting involved in this profession. Let us wait for the 2011 census and we will see."

More marriages of a forced nature are taking place every day, according to George, who fears that failure to implement laws against feticide will only add to this small but growing population of unnatural unions.

Several decades ago, men from villages in these parts trekked across India in search of brides. Almost all such marriages were second marriages, borne of desperation – a widower's desire to remarry after being spurned by a village girl on account of his age.

That was the fate of Tanjala, 35, from Bihar, who was married 20 years ago to Lal Mohammad, now 60, in Ibrahimpur, in Uttar Pradesh. Her friend and village mate, Sameema, 32, also from Bihar, was married to a man 28 years her senior when she was just 17.

"It was hard for my husband to find a young woman willing to marry him so they looked outside the state," said Tanjala.

"It was so difficult when we first came," said Sameema, whispering so that other women in the village would not hear her. "People would call us names and abuse us under their breath."

Open Letter to Anti-Abortionists

Open Letter to Anti-Abortionists

"IF ANTI-ABORTIONISTS SPENT HALF AS MUCH TIME GETTING RID OF POVERTY AS THEY SPEND TRYING TO GET RID OF ABORTION POOR WOMEN WOULDN'T NEED ABORTIONS AS OFTEN ANYWAY."

73% of women who have abortions are living below the poverty level (earning $9,570 or less per year).

Read more...

The Truth about Anti-Feminists

I recently tangled with the Anti-Feminist movement and came away with several conclusions.

I decided to go to Anti-Feminist websites and make a list of what their major complaints against feminists were.

After awhile it became clear that there was one major theme mentioned on almost all the websites that bash feminists.

Spousal and child support.

You see what has happened is these are men who got a woman pregnant (possibly by refusing to wear a condom), and maybe even married her before or after the pregnancy. Either way, their relationship fells apart and now these men are paying for child support (and spousal support if they married/divorced them too).

After they are separated and now paying for diapers and baby food these men become very angry and bitter about their depleted wallets.

So who do they blame?

Feminists for fighting for the right to child/spousal support. As if being a single mother isn't hard enough these "deadbeat dads" want to renege on their financial obligations and because the law is deducting from the pay-cheques there isn't a lot they can do about it.

So the vast majority of anti-feminists are simply deadbeat dads. That is it. Such a simple truth when you think about it.

And they shall suffer the consequences of their 5 minutes of pleasure just for the sake of what... not wearing a condom?

These losers have only one person they should really be blaming: Themselves.

The Truth about Misogyny, from the horse's mouth...

Ever wondered what causes misogyny and sexist behaviours?

Well, here is an excellent article about it: The Origins & Causes of Misogyny.

Written by a man who asserts that it is years of bitterness against females that leads to feelings of misogyny, in combination with other factors such as parental misogyny and more.

The male author however asserts at the same time that women need to be treating men with more sensitivity in order to prevent this kind of bitterness. Treating men like insensitive jerks is actually causing them to turn into insensitive jerks.

"However at the same time women need to learn that men are not insensitive jerks. Rather, they are HIGHLY sensitive jerks and need to be treated more gently and fairly. It may take more time and effort on the part of women, but if more women took the time to reject men in such a way it doesn't feel like a rejection then we'd have a lot less bitter men walking around."

He stresses that both men and women need to learn more about how the opposite sex thinks, women need to learn how to reject men with sensitivity, and men need to learn how to deal with rejection so that the man doesn't end up feeling bitterness.

The article therefore asserts that women are partially to blame for sexism due to our mistreatment of men. Perhaps he is correct. There is a ring of truth to that, even though we may not want to admit it.

Relationships are a two way street and we need to think twice about how we treat men, whether we are treating them fairly, especially if we expect them to treat us fairly too.

Finally the Truth about Rape Victim in Saudi Arabia

Justice and Truth: Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has pardoned the victim of a gang rape, whose sentencing to 200 lashes caused an international outcry.

Justice Minister Abdullah bin Mohammad al-Sheikh said the king had the right to issue pardons if it was in the "public interest". The Saudi monarch usually issues pardons to mark the Muslim Eid al-Adha festival which begins on Wednesday this week.

The 19-year-old Shi'ite woman was abducted and raped along with a male companion by seven men last year in a case that has drawn criticism from around the world.

Ruling according to Saudi Arabia's strict reading of Islamic law, a court originally sentenced the woman to 90 lashes for being alone with an unrelated man and the rapists to prison terms of up to five years.

The Supreme Judicial Council last month increased the sentence to 200 lashes for the woman and six months in prison and ordered the rapists to serve between two years and nine years in prison.

President George W. Bush said earlier this month that King Abdullah "knows our position loud and clear" on the case, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said last month he hoped the ruling would be changed.

Fawziya al-Oyouni, a women's rights activist, welcomed the change but said it was not enough.

"We don't want to rely simply on pardons. We need harsher sentences for the guilty parties and we want to feel safe," she said, citing another rape case in the Eastern Province this month.

Is this a sign that rape victims in Saudi Arabia might finally be treated equitably? Maybe. Give it time and the truth will eventually shine like a beacon of light to the rest of the Middle East.

MORE DETAILS:

She was only 19 and a new bride when it happened.

Seven men held her at knifepoint and, for a number of hours, she was subjected to a horrific gang rape.

But when she later went to the authorities, they sentenced her to 90 lashes.

She complained in the media, so the punishment was increased to 200 lashes and imprisonment.

Her lawyer has been suspended for speaking out against it.

Too outlandish to be true? Well, these are the bare facts of the so- called "Qatif girl" case, which has become a cause celebre among Western liberals and in Saudi Arabia, the West's most important Middle Eastern ally.

Earlier this week, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, declared that what had happened was, indeed, an "outrage".

But he did not mean that the rape victim had suffered a gross injustice.

No, only that criticism of his country was a foreign conspiracy.

The plight of the anonymous victim has served to cast an embarrassing light on one of the world's most authoritarian and oppressive regimes.

Specifically, it has exposed the power of a judicial system based on the Sharia law of the extreme Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam and its appalling treatment of women and persecution of religious minorities.

International pressure to clear the young woman is growing.

Now, as one Saudi judge who might well hear her latest appeal declares that she should have been sentenced to death, the victim's voice has been heard in public for the first time.

The pressure group Human Rights Watch has just released a transcript of an interview which the Qatif girl gave to one of its workers.

Her account reveals the horrific details of the original ordeal and how, having gone to the police, she was abused and demonised by the Saudi judicial system.

The attack took place in February last year and had its roots in a typical Saudi teenage arrangement which in the West would seem odd, but is a way of getting round the strict Islamic sex segregation laws.

Forbidden from approaching young women directly, young men make contact by publicly displaying their own mobile phone numbers on cards as they pass in the street or by dropping the cards through open car windows.

Others make contact using their phone's Bluetooth technology, which allows users to send messages to nearby mobile phones without knowing the telephone number.

"I had a relationship with someone on the phone," recalled the Qatif girl.

"It started when we were both 16. I had never seen him before, I just knew his voice. Then he started to threaten me and I got afraid.

"He threatened to tell my family about the relationship. Because of the threats and fear, I agreed to give him a photo of myself."

But when the girl wed another young man she became worried about the photo she had given to her "ex-boyfriend".

"I asked him for the photo back but he refused. He said: 'I'll give you the photo on the condition that you come out with me in my car.'

"I told him we could meet at a souk [market] near my neighbourhood in Qatif."

She recalled: "He started to drive me home, and when were about to turn the corner to my house, another car stopped right in front of our car.

"Two people got out of their car and stood on either side of our car. The man on my side had a knife.

"They tried to open our door. I told the individual with me not to open the door, but he did. He let them come in. I screamed."

The ordeal had begun.

"One of the men brought a knife to my throat. They told me not to speak. They pushed both of us to the back of the car and started driving. We drove a lot, but I didn't see anything since my head was forced down.

"They took us to an area with lots of palm trees. No one was there. If you kill someone there, no one would know about it."

First, they took the girl's male companion from the car.

He was the victim of homosexual rape a number of times during the course of the evening.

"I was so afraid," the girl said.

"Then they forced me out of the car. They pushed me really hard. I yelled out: 'Where are you taking me? I'm like your sister.'"

They took her to a building. Then two men came in and stripped her.

"The first man with the knife raped me. I was destroyed. I tried to force them off but I couldn't. Another man came in and did the same thing to me. I didn't even feel anything after that."

For two hours the girl begged the two men to take her home.

"I told them that it was late and that my family would be asking about me.

Then I saw a third man come into the room. There was a lot of violence.

After the third man came in, a fourth came. He slapped me and tried to choke me.

"The fifth and sixth ones were the most abusive. The fifth one took a photo of me like this. After the seventh one, I couldn't feel my body any more. I didn't know what to do. When a very fat man was on top of me I could no longer breathe."

Before she was eventually taken home by the gang, she was raped again by all seven attackers.

"They took my mobile and saw my husband's picture in my wallet.

"When I got out of the car [at her home], I couldn't even walk. I rang the doorbell and my mother opened the door. She said: 'You look tired.'

"She thought I was with my husband.

"I went to the hospital the next day. I didn't eat for one week after that, just drank water. I didn't tell anyone, but I would see the rapists faces in my sleep."

However, the story began to leak out.

"The criminals started talking about it in my neighbourhood. They thought my husband would divorce me. They wanted to ruin my reputation. Slowly, my husband started to know what had happened."

But he stood by her, outraged at what the men had done and the fact they were going unpunished.

"Two of the criminals were walking round our neighbourhood, right in front of me," her husband said.

He complained to the police on four occasions before anything was done.

Human rights activists are sure the authorities' reluctance to investigate and their subsequent actions have much to do with the fact that the woman was from Saudi's Shi'ite minority, while the accused are from the majority Sunni Muslims.

When her attackers were finally called to account, the girl had to go to court, where she received a hostile reception.

"At the first session, the judges said to me: 'What kind of relationship did you have with this individual [the man she originally agreed to meet]? Why did you leave the house? Do you know these men?'

"They asked me to describe the situation. They yelled at me. They were insulting. The judge refused to allow my husband in the room with me.

"One judge told me I was a liar because I didn't remember the dates well. They kept saying: 'Why did you leave the house? Why didn't you tell your husband where you were going?'"

The second session, in October last year, proved to be even more shocking.

Four of the attackers - the three others were not found - were given sentences of between one and five years and between 80 and 1,000 lashes.

They were convicted only of kidnapping because the prosecution could not prove rape even though the video images taken on the mobile phone during the attack were presented to the judges.

"I thought these people shouldn't even live," said their victim.

"I thought they would get a minimum of 20 years."

Then the senior judge turned to her and her male companion on the night of the gang rape.

"He said: 'You get 90 lashes. You should thank God you're not in prison.'

"I asked him why and he said: "You know why. Because mingling begets evil.' "

She had been convicted under the khalwa - Sharia law which forbids any woman from being alone in the company of a male to whom she is not related.

"Don't you have any dignity?" her husband demanded of the judges. It was no good. And worse was to follow. The girl grew suicidal. Her own brother blamed her for the attack and his family's "shame".

"He hit me and tried to kill me," she said.

But she was not prepared to accept her unjust punishment.

With the backing of the leading Saudi human rights lawyer, Abdul Rahman al-Laham, she made the facts public, even giving an interview to an Arab TV channel. But far from embarrassing the authorities, this merely seemed to enrage them.

On November 14, the General Court of Qatif struck back, increasing her sentence to 200 lashes and six months in prison.

(Flogging is usually carried out in batches by a prison official who has to hold a copy of the Koran under his whip arm, which prevents it from being raised very high).

The rapists' sentences were also increased to between two and 11 years each.

An official at the court said that her sentence was raised because of "her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media".

Judge Sa'd al-Muhanna also banned her lawyer, Abdul Rahman al-Laham, from the courtroom and from representing her in future for allegedly raising his voice in court.

His licence to practise has been suspended and his passport seized.

He faces a further hearing before a Ministry of Justice disciplinary committee in Riyadh next week for appearing regularly on television and talking about the case.

Overnight, though, the Qatif girl's case became a matter of international interest.

How on earth could the Saudi authorities justify such behaviour?

US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton became involved. But far from retreating, the Saudi authorities dug their heels in.

Official statements posted on the Ministry of Justice website in the past fortnight have alleged that the girl admitted adultery and was already undressed in the car when she was attacked by the rapists.

One statement went so far as to say that it was her own fault: "The main reason the crime took place was because the woman and her companion, who exposed her to this heinous crime, did not follow the law."

The ministry chastised the media for providing an "unjustified defence" of the woman.

A representative of the ministry also appeared on television blaming her for the attack.

He strongly hinted that she had engaged in adultery.

Earlier this week a Saudi newspaper published an interview with Judge Dr Ibrahim bin Salih al-Khudairi of the Riyadh Appeals Court, in which he said that he would have sentenced her to death.

The Appeals Court, and possibly Judge al-Khudairi, will consider the appeal that the Qatif girl said she intends to file.

Impartial? Hardly.

"How is this woman going to get a fair hearing?" asks Farida Deif, of Human Rights Watch.

"The Ministry of Justice has been highly defamatory of her and suggestive that she committed adultery and it was, therefore, her own fault.

"Yes, she broke the law on mingling, but the court should have shown some discretion given that she was brutally gang-raped.

"But this is a country with no written penal law, in which the judges are religious scholars with very little formal legal training."

Thanks to the internet and satellite television however, the Qatif girl's case has caused many Saudis to question the fairness of their own judicial system.

Legal reforms have been announced recently.

But life in the kingdom is still dominated by the religious police who work for the Commission For The Propagation Of Virtue And The Prevention Of Vice to enforce a strict Islamic lifestyle.

They are the untouchables.

Indeed, only on Thursday it was reported that charges against two religious policemen had been dropped. They had been investigated following the death of a man in custody.

The man had been arrested for allegedly drinking alcohol and there was evidence that he had been kicked in the head - but not sufficient to pursue the case, a judge decided.

It echoes a similar case in the summer in which three other members of the religious police had charges dropped after the death of another suspect in custody.

The victim's alleged crime was, like that of the Qatif girl, being alone with an unrelated member of the opposite sex.

The Saudi foreign minister has said that the judicial system will review the Qatif girl's case.

In the meantime, as she awaits her fate, she remains under virtual house arrest, unable to communicate with the outside world; her traumatised family's phones are tapped by the religious police and they are followed when they leave the house.

Meanwhile, the girl is still tormented by thoughts of suicide. But then, in the medieval world of Saudi law she has only herself to blame.

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International Women's Day