Eve after the fall: By Alexandre Cabanel.

Ophelia Benson on oppression of women under religious regimes.

This summer more than a hundred women in the Maldives were sentenced to public flogging for extramarital sex while about fifty men received the same sentence. On July 5, an eighteen-year-old girl received hundred lashes in front of a jeering crowd of men. Local journalists reported that the woman fainted after receiving the lashes and required hospitalisation. She was pregnant at the time of sentencing, and her punishment was deferred until her child was born. The court ruled that the woman’s pregnancy was proof of her guilt, while the men involved in the case were acquitted.

Maldives Dissent reported that the woman was actually under-age when the sex took place: “Sadly, this is not an isolated case. At least twenty-two girls under eighteen years of age were sentenced to public flogging, in 2006, for fornication or giving birth out of wedlock. Under Maldivian law child sexual abuse requires a confession by the alleged abuser or testimony by four eyewitnesses, for a successful conviction to take place. This means that if a victim reports sexual abuse but the perpetrator denies it and there are no eyewitnesses, the court can find the child guilty of having consented to the sex. The state would then wait for the girl to turn eighteen and then carry out the sentence of public flogging, in effect, punishing her for reporting the crime.”

After a British journalist, Maryam Omidi, reported the incident in Minivan News, there were demonstrations in support of flogging. A letter to Minivan News accused it of trying “to tarnish sharia law tirelessly in various indirect forms.” The letter writer explained, “Women get pregnant and that’s the reality of life. Women who fornicate are seen by the public, unlike men. Two parties are involved, but women should know that naturally they are created differently. They get pregnant and consequently the chances of receiving the due punishment are higher.”

The president of the Maldives, Mohammed Nasheed, is a liberal, but is inhibited by his dependence on Islamist coalition allies and by opponents who are using a debate over sharia as a political tool.

In April, Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, signed a new Shia Personal Status Law which regulates marriage, divorce, and inheritance for the country’s Shia population. The law includes provisions that require a woman to ask permission to leave the house except on urgent business, a duty to make herself up or dress up for her husband on demand, and a duty not to refuse sex when her husband wants it.

Women in the Afghan parliament complained that the law was rushed through with the help of several prominent Shia leaders. Many women’s rights activists who protested the law received threats while their fears were compounded by the killing of a prominent women’s rights campaigner and local councillor, Sitara Achakzai, the week the law was signed.

In July, the law was amended and sent back to the parliament, with an added clause allowing husbands to starve their wives if they refuse to have sex. On July 27, it came into force through an official gazette. “Karzai has made an unthinkable deal to sell Afghan women out in return for the support of fundamentalists in the August 20 election,” Human Rights Watch noted in a statement.

In Dublin, on May 20, the Ryan Commission released its report on abuse of children in industrial schools run by religious orders in Ireland, focusing on the period from 1936 to 1970. The report runs to thousands of pages in five volumes and tells of systematic deprivation and abuse – physical, intellectual and emotional – that shocked Ireland to its core.

To take just one example, chapter seven in volume two, running more than hundred pages, covers just one institution, largely for girls: Saint Vincent’s Industrial School, Goldenbridge. It has headings on physical abuse, corporal punishment, formal beatings on the landing (page after page of horror), punishment for bedwetting, climate of fear, discrimination, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, neglect of children’s basic needs, making rosary beads for sale to a factory (arduous forced labour with harsh punishments for failure to meet a demanding quota) and much more.

In other words, the report paints a hideous, blood-chilling picture of settled, official, routine cruelty endured by already unhappy, lonely and traumatised children, mostly girls.

In March, news broke that a nine-year-old Brazilian girl had an abortion after she had been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather. The local archbishop, José Cardoso Sobrinho, declared that the girl’s mother and the doctors who performed the abortion were automatically excommunicated.

In July, the Vatican produced a document, published on page seven of L’Osservatore Romano which unequivocally confirmed automatic excommunication for anyone involved in an abortion: “Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offence. The church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life. The church does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.”

Religious journalist Karen Armstrong has written many books and articles insisting that religion is centrally about compassion, but this is not the case. Perhaps she means it ought to be, and that certainly seems right. If you are going to have religion, it ought to put compassion first. But wishing does not make it so, in the real world, religion is centrally concerned with control, discipline, following rules – and harsh punishment.

The usual response to that claim is that real religion, religion properly understood, is about compassion, and all the rule-enforcing and brutal chastisement is the product of misunderstanding. But that won’t do – it is no good pretending the ideal is the real while the real is just confusion. Reality is what real people really do, not what they might do if only everyone were better and kinder. Some religions and denominations do put compassion first, and so do many believers, but that’s not enough to justify the claim that religion as such is primarily about compassion.

In any case, even if religion is partly or potentially about compassion, it has other features which make it dangerous for subordinated groups. We are often reminded of Wilberforce and Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu – but they came after many centuries of Christian support for slavery and other forms of subordination.

The problem is that religious law is sacred law and as such is above mere human needs and wishes. Attempts to change laws and customs are often countered by claims that they were ordained by God and that it is human impertinence and blasphemy to attempt to improve them.

That is the great difference between secular law and religious commands. Even secular legal instruments that are designed to be partly immune from majority will, such as written constitutions and universal declarations of rights, are still known to be human agreements rather than donations from a deity. They are backed by reasons, not revelations. Religious codes and holy books, by contrast, are taken to have been handed down by a deity who is no longer available for amendment or appeal. From that point of view, it does not matter whether contemporary human beings think the codes are good for human beings or not: it is not their affair, and they have no right and no power to change things.

The God of the monotheistic religions is male, which is not surprising, since it was males who created those religions. But the result is that even now, when it has finally dawned on much of humanity that women are not naturally inferior or subordinate, many devout believers continue to believe that women are and should be subject to a myriad of unequal laws.

Religion dresses up power in robes and mitres, it disguises force majeure as the will of a male God. Men are doing what God wants them to do, and so are women. Women have narrow confined restricted lives and no right to their own will because that is what God ordained. The pill is sugared – and the door is slammed shut.

This is interesting because religion is widely supposed to be centrally about compassion, justice, mercy – qualities not usually attributed to enforcing the subordination of the underdog. It can be tempting to conclude that compassion and justice are simply labels attached to whatever religion does, to make its votaries feel good, rather than descriptions of reality.

However that may be, the reality is that religion is very often somewhere on the scene when women are being regulated, or punished, or deprived, or coerced. What would otherwise look like stark bullying is very often made respectable and holy by a putative religious law or aphorism or scriptural quotation.♦

Ophelia Benson is an editorial advisor to Independent World Report and editor of butterfliesandwheels.com. Her latest book, coauthored with Jeremy Stangroom: Does God Hate Women?