“Christian teachings lead to beating women”
A new report notes that, despite the extensive coverage of the “lashes for wearing trousers” cases, “whipping is not confined to north Sudan”:
Sudanese women also get beaten for wearing trousers due to Christian orders in the country’s south. In October 2008, a southern Sudan cabinet minister said that more than 20 women were arrested and beaten for allegedly dressing inappropriately under a new edict against “bad behaviour”.
“Between 20 and 30 girls were picked up from different points, hurled into police lorries, arrested and taken to the police station and some of them were beaten,” said Mary Kiden Kimbo, the gender, social welfare and religious affairs minister in the semi-autonomous southern government.
“This is absolutely not acceptable: it is not the job of police to judge what is and what is not a correct way to dress in such a manner of blanket punishment,” she said.
The Christian police crackdown on young women wearing trousers or short skirts follows an order from the commissioner of Juba county, the capital of southern Sudan. Most of the women, said to be in their late teens and 20s, were rounded up as they left Catholic mass in Juba on Sunday, Kimbo said. Others were picked up in market places.
The order bans “all bad behaviours, activities and imported illicit cultures,” according to a copy signed by Juba’s commissioner, Albert Pitia Redantore. Inappropriate behaviour may include wearing tight trousers, short skirts or skimpy tops considered “Western” attire.
The order, dated October 2nd 2008, said it aimed to “preserve the cultural values, dignity and achievements of the people of southern Sudan, checking out the intrusion of foreign cultures into our societies, for the sake of bringing up (a) good generation.”
