By Melanie Nathan & Cathy Kristofferson
While the Ugandans still allow for the distractions and time wasting Anti-Homosexuality Bill to dominate the discourse about sexual immorality and so called defilement of children, with one single case yet to appear as evidence of such, this article appeared in their press today:
20 girls defiled daily in Uganda but we see no evil, hear no evil
“Ten-year-old Sylvia Suubi was grazing cattle with her brother when an unidentified man armed with a machete jumped them. He forced the little girl to the ground and raped her. Then he strangled her.
A few days earlier, also in Luweero District, a gang of men, also unidentified, had waylaid a 38-year-old mother-of-three, gang-raped her and strangled her.
Others were lucky to trade their dignity and innocence for their lives. In Karamoja, a group of soldiers gang-raped a young girl leaving her in hospital with injuries and trauma she will live with for the rest of her life.
The army contributed some money to the hospital bills and promised an investigation but soon moved on.
The first two stories from Luweero happened in the last week. You probably missed them because rape, which we dignify with the more sanitised term ‘defilement’, has become too commonplace to even raise eyebrows.
Yet rape and defilement are all around us. According to the official figures, 7,690 cases of defilement were reported to the police in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available.
There is a lot of stigma surrounding defilement, especially since family members and people close to the victims often do it. Most cases therefore go unreported. Yet even if you disregard the unreported cases, the figures show that 21 girls are defiled in Uganda everyday…. read more…. http://www.monitor.co.ug/OpEd/OpEdColumnists/DanielKalinaki/20-girls-defiled-daily-in-Uganda-but-we-see-no-evil/-/878782/1706856/-/yil1yh/-/index.html
These rapes are at the hands of straight – heterosexual men.
“How many fathers and mothers go to sleep each night worried about the safety of their little girls? How many can trust that the house help, shopkeeper or schoolteacher is not a pedophile waiting to pounce?
Yet we hardly speak about this problem. Many who have found fame and fortune as moral crusaders have no time to see or hear the evil that is in almost every home or village. After all, while there are people willing to pay for attacks and for the defence of all sorts of minority groups, few are willing to pay to save the 21 girls who are defiled everyday.
Dear Reader, one of these days you might find yourself in conversation with one of those foreign types with a fleeting view of the world. When you mention Uganda the question will, almost invariably, shift to the topic of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and whether we are a country that kills gays. The correct answer is no, we are a country that allows the rape of our young girls to go on around us while we act indifferently.”
Deafening Silence in the name of Christianity:
We have yet to hear the noisy proponents of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, otherwise known as The Kill the Gays Bill, such as religious Evangelical MP Hon. David Bahati, Martin Ssempa , Scott Lively, Lou Engle address this critically disturbing issue. One can only wonder why the Christian Evangelicals, so passionate about morality, sit on their mouths on this issue, yet do not stop blabbing about non-existent harm that they perceive gays may potentially procure upon their children.
It is also interesting to note how many pages Tabloids such as Red Pepper spend on persecuting innocent gay people, just for the sake of outing them and selling more papers, while not for a moment do they OUT a single such straight rapist!
It is time for Ugandans to transfer their energy to the real moral issues facing their country.
Gay media are trying to tarnish the image of a lovely country Uganda negatively. Nevertheless they are failing as their negative information are baseless, that is why it is attracting less atention.
This article appeared in the Uganda Press. Uganda ‘s image is tarnished by rape of women, corruption of government, nothing to do with gays. The Parliament is trying to distract from real Uganda problems by pretending gays are the problem. Its time to pay attention to the real problems of Uganda .
But this was a Ugandan report apparently, and Daniel Kalinaki is a well-respected (in many quarters) journalist. Are you saying that Ugandan reports are ‘baseless’, Rith?
I do remember that report in the New Vision a few years ago about the defilement of possibly more than 40,000 schoolgirls by male teachers in 2008. Here’s a link to that report: http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/12/642443
The New Vision is the ‘government newspaper’, and so one might reasonably assume that the Government of Uganda is concerned by what is happening.
I think Melanie’s point is that the anti-gay hysteria is helping to lead to a ‘covering up’ of some very serious issues. It is interesting to note that, in countries like the UK and the USA, there has been a much more focused (and arguably successful) effort to deal with child sexual abuse since people have become less hysterical about the fact that some people are gay. Many of those child abuse cases that have recently come to light recently date from a time when these societies were much more homophobic. It might even be suggested that homophobia is an ‘ally’ of paedophilia, since it (homophobia) distracts attention from the ‘real issues’.
Thank you for the comment