Law
The Law in the UAE has provided little redress for rape victims. Over 50% of women residents in the UAE who responded to a survey said they would not report a rape to police. In 2008, an Australian woman working in the UAE was gang raped after her drink was spiked. She reported it to the authorities and was imprisoned for 8 months on an adultery charge as extramarital sex is illegal in the UAE. In 2010 a Muslim woman in Abu Dhabi recanted her allegations of being gang-raped by 6 men after being threatened with corporal punishment for premarital sex. Nadya Khalife, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, has observed that "these charges will make young women in the UAE, citizens and tourists alike, think twice about seeking justice and reporting sexual assaults for fear of being charged themselves,"She also stated that "the message to women is clear: victims will be punished for speaking out and seeking justice, but sexual assault itself will not be properly investigated."
Read more about this topic: Women In The United Arab Emirates
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