Child Abuse in Saudi Arabia and Abroad

Abeer Mishkhas is a Saudi journalist always worth reading. Her comments on Saudi society are insightful and concise. She has a piece in today’s Arab News about the phenomenon of child abuse, looking at recent cases in Saudi Arabia, the US, and the UK. She notes that the problem of child abuse seems to be global and wonders what can be done about it.

Rather than ‘global’, I think the problem is one of the human condition. Some parents, who ought not to ever have become parents, abuse children. Emotional or mental problems prevent them from understanding what they are doing or deprive them of the concern they should have for their children. No amount of preaching from any denomination’s pulpits will stop the problem; no amount of punishment will stop the problem. Only mitigation and attempts to reduce the incidence of child abuse are realistic.

I think she is right in calling for society to become better informed about the problem. Society should also be empowered to step in and call for help when abuse is first discovered. The way Saudi society tends to defer to personal privacy and to avoid getting into other people’s business does need modification if it permits child abuse to flourish.

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia does not need to become a country of busybodies, too concerned about the neighbor’s behavior over their own behavior. And anyway, isn’t that the role of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice? Concern for children can become excessive, as when people are arrested for a simple swat of a misbehaving child’s backside. Being able to distinguish real abuse from imagined abuse is necessary, of course.

Areej and Baby P
Abeer Mishkhas | Arab News

In a single day, wire services carried three items of news from Jeddah, New York and London. The three stories shared a common theme albeit with different characters and backgrounds. All three dealt with specific cases of child abuse and murder. The Jeddah story is as follows: The Jeddah court sentenced the father of Areej, the nine-year-old girl who was tortured to death, to death. His wife who was his accomplice received five years in jail. As Arab News reported last week, Areej died in the middle of last year and officials from the Red Crescent Society discovered her body outside her home and, suspecting she had been tortured, informed police.

Security agents then arrested Areej's father and his second wife. The two later confessed to torturing the girl to death and said they had beaten her and pressed a hot iron on different parts of her body. The court gave its verdict after hearing both sides. The girl's mother — who was divorced from her father — and her uncle appointed a lawyer to represent them in court. The National Society for Human Rights also followed on the case. On the same day of the Areej verdict, a court in New York sentenced a mother to 43 years in jail for failing to save and help her seven-year-old son who was tortured and starved by his father. The father was sentenced to 29 years in jail.
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