Thailand’s rape statistics pale in comparison to Europe’s epidemic
Re: “Police must stop negotiating freedom for rapists”, Have Your Say, September 24.
I trust Khun Chavalit will not be looking to Europe for any solutions to this scandal. In the Netherlands, even the judiciary is on the rapist’s side. Last week, a judge reduced a 24-month sentence on Mr Zaman, an Afghan migrant rapist, to 20 months so that he would not risk losing his Dutch residence permit. Said the judge: “It was not the intention that the punishment should lead to far-reaching immigration consequences.”
But the Dutch outrage pales into insignificance against the child rape epidemic in UK, where police, local authorities, central government and the media conspired over three decades to cover up the most shocking scandal in the history of my country, and where perpetrators are often not brought to court “because it is too difficult”, or are given derisory sentences. Khun Chavalit refers to Thailand’s 306 cases of sexual violence in 2015. At a political party conference last weekend, Lord Pearson from UK’s House of Lords referred to “between three and five million rapes of white, Sikh and non-Muslim girls by Muslim men in the last 15 years”.
That horrific figure, annualised, is a hundred thousand per cent higher than Thailand’s. But I don’t wish to belittle Khun Chavalit’s figure of 306 – when it comes to children, one is too many.
Nigel Pike
Phang Nga
