It has unfortunately become a regular headline in our newspapers. We learn of people beaten up by members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice — for short, the commission. The details of the beatings and the reasons for them can be dealt with later but the outstanding fact that strikes us is that people were assaulted with a severity that lands them in hospitals and, in two reported cases, killed those who were assaulted.
The latest of these reports concerns a boy from Najran who was attacked by the commission. Allegedly — and I am quoting from the newspaper report, the boy “confronted the men over a violation supposedly committed by his brother.” In other words, he was not the target; he was simply defending his brother. According to the boy, four members of the commission “insulted him and banged his head against a car until he became unconscious.”
The boy was transferred to a hospital and is still being treated for “serious” injuries. The commission actually replied to the boy’s allegation, and the reply was published in Arab News. It said the boy attacked the members with a sharp object, and that the members were acting in “self-defense.”
Their reply does not say what the boy’s crime was nor does it specify what violation was committed by his brother. The commission members, it seems, were defending themselves by beating the boy’s head repeatedly against a car. Their reply is vague and indefinite and serves as no more than a rebuke to the media that carried the boy’s story. It concentrates on implicating members of the boy’s family, saying that his brother and his father had been detained on separate occasions in the past for alleged indecent behavior. As if to avoid saying what the boy’s offense was — and indeed if it was an offense — why was he not interrogated in a civilized manner rather than being beaten?
One more thing that comes to mind — if the commission members are trained to deal with offenders — and we have been told many times that they are — doesn’t their training include how to deal with people without injuring them?
This story is not the first and is probably not the last on people being mistreated by commission members. On Jan. 11, Arab News carried a story about a security guard in a shopping center who was beaten up by commission members and sustained injuries that necessitated hospitalization. The guard was not accused of any indecent behavior; on the contrary, he was doing the job that he had been hired to do. The report says that he had detained a man who was verbally abusing two girls and taken him to a commission center where he witnessed the members assaulting the person who had been called to come and take the man home. When the guard interfered in what he saw as mistreatment, he too was beaten.
But the most tragic case is of the man who was beaten to death in front of his father. To make matters worse, the court cleared the commission members from charges of murder. It issued a rather interesting judgment that said that the man had not died because of commission members kicking him in the head. No, the judgment said that “the head is not cause of death and the legs are not instruments.” Therefore, the logic — if we can call it that — was that the man did not die because of being kicked in the head.
From reading these reports, it is clear that hitting someone on the head seems to be popular among commission members and is not considered harmful or fatal which makes it much more desirable to use in self-defense. The disturbing thing, if anything can be more disturbing, is that the commission keeps coming up with the line that the media are exaggerating and that their reputation is being tarnished on purpose. In other words, there is quite a considerable degree of denial here, but when it comes to people’s lives, such denials should not be tolerated. The commission needs to revise its methods, and maybe it would function more effectively under the supervision of the police. If so and there was a need to subdue an angry teenager, the police might know a safer way of dealing with him than banging his head against a car until he was unconscious.
