The Kingdom is one of the world’s safest societies. Crimes do occur, but those who have lived here know that their lives, homes, women and children are safer here than in the home countries of many of them. This expectation of safety helps to explain the shock and disgust at the appalling treatment and eventual murder of a nine year-old girl in Makkah which has resulted in the arrest of the child’s father and stepmother. Though the complete story is still to come out, it already seems clear that this poor girl was let down repeatedly, despite urgent appeals from her biological mother and even her paternal uncle.
Saudi Arabia is by no means alone in this initial unwillingness to accept that children are in fact abused and even murdered by close relatives. In Europe and North America in recent years, there has been a steady stream of horror stories concerning the mistreatment and death of children at the hands of family members. To any normal person, the idea that a helpless child could be harmed by its parents is as incomprehensible as it is horrific. This might explain why, in the overseas cases, schoolteachers, family friends, social workers and even doctors and nurses, have repeatedly missed telltale signs of the nightmare of abuse being suffered by a child. The problem has been that because parental abuse was so incredible, it simply was not believed. Unfortunately, as a result of a sickening series of high-profile crimes, the focus has rightly been shifted to fall upon the child with the authorities now hoping for the right to intervene following the slightest suspicion of abuse.
It seems more than likely that a similar reorientation must follow here after the tragedy of the Makkah child who, as required by law, was returned to her father by his divorced wife when the girl reached the age of seven. An attempt by the mother in the courts to regain custody of her daughter failed. Thereafter the evidence began to collect that something was very wrong in the child’s new home. The biological mother was often refused her legal right of access. On the few occasions she did visit her daughter, she saw signs of abuse which she reported to the authorities. It seems, however, that nothing was done.
Even the father’s own brother — the child’s uncle — intervened at one stage, taking the little girl into his home but the father, claiming his daughter had been kidnapped, got her back. Then just days before the little girl was murdered, the mother appealed to the Makkah Municipality, warning the governor that her daughter’s life was in danger. Nothing was done.
A pitifully young life has been lost. The reason is that no coordinated system of spotting possible abuse exists in the Kingdom; as this tragedy shows, such a system is urgently needed as well as mechanisms for legally intervening and protecting children. Even if the natural mother were suspected of trouble-making, it would only have taken one visit to the child to establish the truth. But no one came and the child was left alone, in her fear and pain, to be stabbed to death.
