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Daily Mail, London, 15 December 2010Flogged 53 times ... 'for wearing trousers'Mail Foreign Service
A WOMAN cries out in pain as she is flogged in the street -- apparently for the crime of wearing trousers. These disturbing scenes, from a video posted on YouTube, were shot in Sudan, where public whippings are a common punishment. But the brutality on show yesterday provoked women in the North African country to stage demonstrations against persecution. The woman in the video, dressed in a long black dress and headscarf, screams 'enough, enough' and 'I want my mum', as she is lashed 53 times after being ordered to kneel down in front of a police officer. A second officer -- who laughs when he realises he is being filmed -- joins in the one-and-a-half minute punishment as the woman falls to the ground. During her ordeal, one of the policeman can be heard telling the woman she will be jailed for two years if she does not accept the lashes.
The woman cries out repeatedly for her mother and even tries to grab one of the whips to stop the persistent beating. Sudan's judiciary has launched an investigation into the flogging, after 50 women were arrested for a sit-down protest in the justice ministry in Khartoum yesterday. The women's lawyer, Mona el-Tijani, said: 'This video was just one example of what happens all the time. The authorities here take the law into their own hands. No one knows what happens inside police stations.' In 2009 Lubna Hussein, a Sudanese journalist, was sentenced to 40 lashes for appearing in public wearing trousers. After international criticism, she was released with a fine. © Associated Newspapers Ltd
This is the video mentioned in the above report. It makes for harrowing viewing because the woman is screaming all the time. Do not view it if you are squeamish about such things. Even those who approve of judicial CP in appropriate cases, if carried out correctly, may well find this a brutal and disgusting display of stupidity. Quite apart from the ridiculous reason for the whipping (assuming the news reports are correct), it is so incompetently done -- with random, arbitrary blows all over the body, in some cases even appearing to strike the woman's head -- that it can scarcely be regarded as proper corporal punishment at all. The Arab world generally seems very poor at this. It is odd in the case of Sudan, once run by the British, who knew how to do CP correctly. At the least, one would have thought it obvious that the offender needs to be held still by some means before the whipping proceeds. HERE IS THE CLIP:
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Country files: Judicial corporal punishment in Sudan Other months for judicial CP in Sudan:
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