AP via DHA
In a shocking modern day version of the story of Lorena Bobbitt, a Turkish woman sought justice the only way she thought she could against her alleged repeated rapist (and father of her unborn child): By murdering him, shooting him in the crotch, and then decapitating him, then walking into the village square with the man’s head by his hair, warning onlookers: “Don’t talk behind my back, don’t play with my honor,” Yildirim said to the men sitting in the coffee house on the square. “Here is the head of the man who played with my honor.”
Her father has insisted she never reported the abuse to anyone in the family before, or else “…we would have taken other precautions,” he said. (Why do I not believe him?)
Are her actions defensible in a country that reportedly has so little respect for women’s rights?
About Mark Radcliffe
You can’t justify injustice with injustice. Or as we’ve all been taught as children: two wrongs don’t make a right.
“Are her actions defensible in a country that reportedly has so little respect for women’s rights?”
Woman kills man. After she has killed him, the woman claims that he has raped her. I don’t see any further evidence of the alleged rapes mentioned. So what you are asking is: “Is the killing of a man by a woman defensible, if she claims afterwards to have been raped by him?” The answer is of course “yes”.
If it’s not just a “claim” and she was, in fact, repeatedly raped, then good for her. If it didn’t actually happen, then that sucks. She’d “deserve” the same treatment as every other powerless person who kills someone in peacetime. Either way she’s going to get punished for it severely.
At the end of the day I thoroughly believe if anything should be a capital crime it should be rape, and since it’s generally not a capital crime and rapists are almost never convicted even when they’re caught, I support vigilante justice in these circumstances.
Whooah…rape is bad, but its not murder. I can accept death as a defensive outcome during an attack, but not as retributive justice, particularly in vigilante form as we have here. You don’t think decapitation is in anyway disproportionate?
@Random_Stranger:
I think this can be related to viewpoints on capital punishment. Personally, I think the death penalty is too lenient for criminals who have committed horrendous acts against others. It is far worse for them to keep them alive; when they are dead, they have lost their capacity to suffer insofar as we are aware and can verify. If I truly wanted the worst vengeance exacted upon a person who had visited despicable violations upon me, I would want them to live for as long as possible so as to torment them throughout the rest of said natural lifespan.
Murder is, in certain respects, not so cruel as rape for this same fact; a person ceases to suffer once they are dead. A person who has been horribly, unspeakably violated and left to cope with the psychological scars for the rest of their life? That is the epitome of cruelty.
@Mark
Hmmm…. sorry, I still don’t agree.
To put the comparison in perspective for you, imagine the police are about to visit you with horrific news. Would you rather learn that your loved one was raped and in the hospital or decapitated and in the morgue?
Added linguistic bonus: The idiom “fate worse than death” originally was euphemistically employed to refer to rape. Check it: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/134650.html
This is exactly the kind of situation a modern day rape survivor in Turkey (and much of the world) finds herself in: a fate worse than death. This is a case of no justice, just terrible retribution.
what you are saying is partially true.. i think in this case what stands out to me is her circumstances and the fact that her actions speak for all women in a country that seems to think a persons ‘honor’ is more important then justice… she was raped and probably a very rare case for someone from that village to stand up for themselves.. i think her actions reflected the injustice she was served as a result of the nature of her society rather then revenge… if she lived in the UK and this happened then the family would’ve been supportive towards her reporting the crime and an investigation would’ve occured and if the evidence was strong then justice should be served in her case it sounds more like her family didn’t want to be what they think of as ‘disgraced’ rather then justice for a victim… it’s 3 in the morning and i’m tired so i dont know if what i’m making sence here.. but do you understand the view i’m coming from
So if a person is falsely accused of rape and is arrested, they should rape (if you’re going to do the time you might as well commit the crime) and murder the accuser because there is a 50% chance that they’ll be convicted and if convicted it would be difficult to exact justice. Does vigilante justice sound as good now?
“At the end of the day I thoroughly believe if anything should be a capital crime it should be rape, and since it’s generally not a capital crime and rapists are almost never convicted even when they’re caught, I support vigilante justice in these circumstances.”
Since men raped by women are even less likely to get justice, does this hold for men raped by women or would you suggest a different standard?
“Her father has insisted she never reported the abuse to anyone in the family before, or else “…we would have taken other precautions,” he said.
(Why do I not believe him?)”
My guess would be subconscious racism
Don’t assume subsconscious racism as the reason for something that is more readily explained by conscious sexism: remember, false claims never happen and any woman who claims abuse is
1) automatically telling the truth, and
2) entitled to take whatever revenge will make her feel better.
@8ball: Sure. That, or Turkey’s long-established history of condoning violence against women:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/05/04/turkey-women-left-unprotected-violence
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3768847.stm
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-breached-human-rights-by-not-protecting-wife-1701107.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/world/europe/women-see-worrisome-shift-in-turkey.html?_r=1
But, whatever’s most convenient for you to believe…
I wrote this on another forum, but I’ll write it again: my main issue is that people are making a lot of assumptions about this because it takes place in the middle east (technically near east). Turkey may have a strong Islamic influence, but it remains a secular republic.
Then you haven’t read much about what goes on in Turkey.
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=mayor-says-they-sort-out-rape-alleations-2010-04-28
http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/06/01/217995.html
I think that there is a real problem making a judgment call here because women can be affected by rape very differently.
I have a friend who is a rape survivor and is 100% functional, doesn’t need therapy, has had several normal sexual relationships since the rape, basically was able to pick up the pieces and move on.
But I also hear stories of women who are psychologically shattered for the rest of their lives. I have no reason to doubt those stories.
If all women were able to simply “move on” then rape is not an act that results in life-long ramifications (unless there is a pregnancy), and therefore murder-for-rape is just not an equal trade, and the action would be indefensible.
But if some women really have their entire lives ruined (cannot form normal relationships again, afraid to travel alone, quit job/school, etc.), then it might be a more defensible action. Obviously not preferable to an organized criminal justice system, but at least as understandable if still not quite defensible (few societies recognize any crime as more serious than murder).
Wait , wait, wait.
First off, I want to say I’m very happy for your friend who moved past what happened to her. It’s not any easy thing, and more often than not, these kinds of assaults leave the men and women whom they were perpetrated against a lot worse for the wear.
But, in your argument I don’t see the logic. Either murder-for-rape is justifiable, or it is not., There aren’t any grey areas based on how well (or not), the victim of said crime can move past it. It’s tree-falling-in-forest logic. Whether or not the victim suffered, a rape still occurred.
We punish for the crimes committed, and the only the duration of the sentence should be measured by the varying degrees of the crime, not by the commission of the crime itself.
I’m not against capital punishment, but I do not think that rape of one adult by another is grounds for the death penalty. Rape and murder, rape and disfigurement, probably, but not rape itself. While serious in nature, by setting such legal precedent, we come into all sorts of grey areas (think young adults making stupid mistakes), and when it comes to life and death, it’s just not good sense.
If you really want to talk about eye-for-an-eye justice (which seems like the only worldview that would make this act defensible), then we need to see a life traded for a life.
I have read accounts of women whose lives were ruined by a rape, and I have no reason to doubt those accounts. If you accept an eye-for-an-eye worldview, then it makes sense that someone whose life has been literally ruined could expect to see the death penalty employed against their attacker.
You are also incorrect when you say “We punish for the crimes committed…not by the commission of the crime itself.”
If you are driving negligently (maybe texting-and-driving) and run a stop sign, you can get charged with failure to follow a posted sign. This is a ticket in most states and punished by a fine.
If you are driving negligently (again texting-and-driving) and you run a stop sign and strike a pedestrian, breaking their leg, you can be charged with vehicular assault. If they die, you can be charged with vehicular manslaughter.
So the result (did you hit anyone? were they injured? did they die?) determines the punishment far more than the behavior (in all three cases you missed a stop sign because you were texting and driving).
Furthermore, the courts in the US have repeatedly upheld the “eggshell skull” rule, which says that you are responsible for all of the damage caused, even if the person was previously disposed to unforeseeable amounts of damage (the hypothetical being you tapped someone on the head, no knowing their skull was eggshell thin, resulting in their death – you are still responsible for killing them).
Take together, we see that results are punished, not actions, and that saying the victim was predisposed to harm is not a defense.
Ergo, if the result is that a woman’s life is truly ruined, and we have no reason to believe otherwise, then in an eye-for-an-eye sense, her attacker’s life should also be ruined. But in the same scenario is the result is NOT a ruined life, and because we punish based on results, then it does not make sense to take her attacker’s life.
What bothers me about the case is that she killed him to protect her honor, not to stop the rapes if she was even raped at all. She could have had an abortion in the first 10 weeks without any legal issues, but decided against it. She could have let him reveal the “rape”. It’s not like after she killed him and brought his head to the town square that no one would know. She did it to protect her honor.
Does this count as an honor killing?
It occurs to me that “honor” was perhaps a mis-translation of what she was actually trying to express, during the process of converting the news from Turkish to English. I can’t know for sure, or course, not being there (or able to speak Turkish), but maybe she was actually saying something closer to “protect my sanity” or “my health” or “my dignity” or just simply “myself.” And as for the abortion, my guess is perhaps getting an abortion in her immediate area wasn’t as convenient and realistic as we’d all like to believe it is. Those unknowables aside, I can certainly sympathize with her wanting to take matters into her own hands if she’s living in a country where this rape and other atrocities against women are perpetrated and condoned on an apparently regular basis.
“And as for the abortion, my guess is perhaps getting an abortion in her immediate area wasn’t as convenient and realistic as we’d all like to believe it is.”
I don’t see how killing him and making the “rape” public would have made it more accessible. Based on what I’ve heard, she waited another 12 or so weeks after an abortion became illegal to kill him. It probably had more to do with her “showing” and being unable to hide it anymore. That seems to indicate that it was an “honor” thing and not necessarily a “rape” thing.
I don’t like disbelieving her, but I think that if you commit a crime and say I did this but, the burden of proof should shift to the accuser to prove that this but actually existed through clear and convincing evidence. If it indeed existed, it should be a mitigating factor; maybe enough to excuse the actual killing and mutilation, but more likely to simply justify reducing the sentence.
Well, obviously it wouldn’t make an abortion easier to obtain. It seems like this form of justice was the only avenue she thought she had to avenge the matter–kill the guy who put her in this predicament.
As for waiting 12 weeks, the story says the guy was raping her REPEATEDLY. Meaning many more incidents after the one that got her pregnant. And I think he was entering her apt again when she finally shot him. Everyone has their breaking point…
What laughably bad writing: ” In a shocking modern day version of the story of Lorena Bobbitt…”
To begin with, the Lorena Bobbitt incident is from 1993; hardly ancient history. If the author had any flair for thoughts and words, he would have said this is a modern day version of Judith of Bethulia and Holofernes.
Which bespeaks of the real problem: Too much of Islamic culture is awash in a Bronze-age mindset of existence being all about revenge, recrimination, and retribution — in short, an ongoing “lex talionis” in which life is defined by death.