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Alexandre was 15 when a man offered to take him to his hotel after a party at a Dubai club. The young French-Swiss boy accepted.

When he got in the car, however, Alexandre was surprised to see another two men inside. The three men took Alexandre to the desert, locked him inside the vehicle and each of them raped him, threatening him with a knife to force him to submit to the abuse.

But Alexandre’s nightmare was only just beginning. When the men pushed him out of the car at the entrance of a hotel and the teenager went to police to report the rape, the police physician who examined him said he found no signs of sexual violence.

He said he could only identify indications of consensual sex and of previous homosexual activity.

The medical examination not only eliminated the crime and the search for the culprits, it also turned Alexandre himself, the victim, into a criminal, since homosexuality is banned and penalized in the United Arab Emirates.

It was only the strong reaction from Alexandre’s parents, one a businessman, the other a journalist, that prevented the case from ending there.

Both parents turned to their connections to make use of diplomatic channels and the matter rose to the highest levels, even reaching French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The couple reacted with the worst threat that can be made in Dubai: bad press. Within days the rapists were arrested and sentenced to various terms in prison.

Alexandre’s case, which occurred in July 2007, soon came to stand for many other rape victims subjected to double torture as they saw themselves become criminals despite being the ones who were attacked.

This is because the way authorities deal with sexual violence in Dubai provides one of the few chinks through which, cutting through the shiny façade of the emirate, one can see that the country is still in a state of flux, with grave social inequities and serious human rights faults.

In Dubai, a large metropolis proud of its image as a place where safe business can be conducted and as a meeting point between East and West, sexual violence is also an attack on two traits deeply enmeshed in the city’s collective conscience: security and the sex taboo.

If rape threatens to do away with both of those, blaming the victim eliminates the two risks with a single blow. There is another consequence: the victim is terrorized and made to think twice before filing a criminal complaint.

“Local authorities on a daily basis ignore violence against women and turn investigations into the crimes against them into ‘morality’ trials for the women,” said Nadya Jalifa, a researcher for women’s rights in the Near East and North Africa with Human Rights Watch.

Jalifa was referring specifically to the case of a British woman who reported that she had been raped on New Year’s Eve while at a hotel in Dubai celebrating her engagement to her boyfriend.

According to testimony gathered by HRW, the police were more interested in the young woman’s sex life and how many alcoholic beverages she had drunk that night, than the rape complaint she was filing.

The couple spent the night in prison and could face trial and up to six years in jail. The accused rapist, who admitted to having had sex with the woman but said it was consensual, was only accused of illegal sexual relations.

“This will make young women, citizens and tourists in general, think twice before seeking justice and filing complaints about sexual attacks in the United Arab Emirates out of fear that they themselves will be accused,” Jalifa said. “The message to women is clear — victims will be punished for talking and seeking justice, but the aggressor will not be investigated as should be.”

Cases such as these are not limited to the experiences of Western tourists in Dubai. The emirate became the prosperous place that it is because of a huge inflow of migrants from poor countries, a group that is also extremely vulnerable and defenseless.

Being able to remain in Dubai hinges on having a job, making workers entirely dependent on their employers. Human rights organizations, among them Sexual Terrorism, have said that human trafficking networks are profiting from migrant flows to Dubai.

Complaints about abuse in environments that are difficult to control, involving domestic workers, are also on the rise.

“Isolation is a dominant aspect in the work environment of the domestic employee in the United Arab Emirates,” says a study on the issue by Rima Sabban, a Dubai University sociologist.

The study also says “labor laws in the United Arab Emirates continue to fail to recognize domestic employment as part of the workforce. The employer commands total responsibility for domestic employees and has absolute control over them.”

As the government seeks to avoid any stain that could sully the emirate’s image, it acknowledges that there is still much to be done with regard to human rights and underscores the progress achieved.

“With a deep aspiration to improve, the United Arab Emirates is interested in broaching questions of human rights,” says an annual report by the Information Ministry.

Nonetheless, cases such as Alexandre’s and those of thousands of other anonymous victims would appear to show that in Dubai it is far easier to raise skyscrapers than it is to knock down taboos. 

DPA