It is very strange to live in a world, and feel that one is for the most part up to date with what is happening in this world, and to have missed out on the phenomena of Muammar al-Gadaffi and his Amazonian guards. Sure, if I saw a photo of him, I would have been able to say Gadaffi and Libya but that is about it. At the same time, this man has been in power for almost all my life, and the only thing that I have known, has been that he was a dictator!
In June, the swedish military library book club that I belong to, had a new book on offer called in Swedish “The prey in Gaddafi’s Harem”. The title said nothing really but the front page that they had planned for it, had a girl sitting turned towards the sea, wearing a veil and it suggested some sort of tragedy. I think at that point, they did not really know what the book was going to be about. It was not published for months. And when I finally got it from the library, it was ugly Gaddafi that stared at me, not the other front cover. But it is the same book.
I finished reading the book in two days, during the autumn school holiday, which means that I managed to read while the children were fighting around me. That says it all! It is a very gripping book. Annick Cojean, journalist in Paris, went down to Libya in search of females that had been part of the revolution. She had a difficult time finding them! But she found Soraya. And the story that Soraya, 22 years old, told, was so shocking, that Cojean had to write a book about her and all the others that were victims of Gaddafi and his Caligula ways!
Soraya grew up in a loving family, with three brothers and two sisters. Her mother is a Tunisian that grew up in Morocco, and who met Soraya’s father in Paris. They married even though they were a mismatch and moved to his native country of Libya. Unfortunately they moved to Sirte, Gaddafi’s tribe’s home town. There the mother set up a beauty salon and was known for her skills.
When Soraya had just turned 15, the school announced that Gaddafi, the country’s “Guide”, was coming for a visit. The most beautiful girls were selected to hand over flowers to him, and Soraya was one of them. Instead of wearing their regular bleak school uniform, the girls were dressed in traditional costume and were told to stand in a reception row. When the Guide arrived he immediately put his hand on Soraya’s head. The signal that he had chosen her for his next victim, his next virgin to rape! But noone knew this except his entourage, since this dark side of his character was carefully kept from the Libyan people! Soraya went home that day but the next day his “body guards”, female monsters, came and fetched her at the beauty salon, saying to her mother that she had been selected to give him flowers again. The mother did not know what to say and do and later on in the story it comes out, that as soon as the father found out, he became hysterical, returned home and blamed his wife for letting her go. They did not get to see their daughter for three years.
Soraya was taken by car to Tripoli and to the compound called Bab al-Azizia. She was taken to a damp, dark cellar and was told to change clothes. A brutal woman named Mabrouka, the Guide’s left hand in many ways, took her up stairs that led to Gaddafi’s bedroom. Soraya was a girl brought up in a strict Muslim home and there she walks in to a room and find a naked man laying in bed waiting for her and screaming at her that she is a whore, especially since her mother is Tunisian. For two days she refused to do as told, on the 3rd he raped her. He was so brutal that she bled for three days. On the 4th day she was raped again and the bleeding got even worse. On the 5th day she was raped again and forced to smoke which has made her in to a chain smoker. And on the 6th day he forced her to drink whiskey. She could not understand that the people of Libya thought this man a good muslim when he was breaking all the rules. He never prayed, did not follow Ramadan and did not let the women around him do so either.
He forced her roommate to have oral sex with him in front of Soraya’s eyes and he forced Soraya to watch porn films so she would learn what to do to him. We are talking about a 15-year-old innocent girl here! Soon he forced her to snort cocaine as well, which she overdosed on, while he raped her 4 times. On the holy Friday, the day of prayer, he would have one man having oral sex with him, have another man dance around in female clothing. His harem did not just consist of females to rape, it was also full of young men as well.
Ramadan according to Gaddafi was sex all day and night, and smoking. On the 27th day that is supposed to be extra holy, and when one has a party, the chief of protocol spoke to Soraya and for this, Gaddafi cut off all her beautiful long hair. And not evenly at that. Some was cut at the scalp and in other places it was longer. On the last day of Ramadan, his wife appeared and Soraya of course wondered what she knew, since she always stayed away. When she arrived at the party that day, all the girls were made to look like servants but was the wife REALLY fooled? After she had left, Gaddafi forced his official mistress’ husband to have anal sex with him.
A year after Soraya was abducted, she witnessed a 13-year-old and 15-year-old arrive. Another observation she had done by then, was that he was constantly drugged. She had also understood that he believed in Black Magic and walked around with a red towel full of blood from virgins. She often met with the Ukrainian nurse Galina, who was one of three nurses, that kept on taking blood tests on ALL women that Gaddafi intended to sleep with. He didn’t want to get HIV or anything. Galina also said that she gave him shots so he could not make anyone pregnant.
At one point, Soraya got to go with all the other girls on a state visit to Mali, with Gaddafi. The 
real bodyguards, the Amazonian guard, always wore blue uniforms. The khaki wearing “soldiers” were all his sex slaves and they were all instructed to look serious, to look at the real bodyguards and copy their behaviour and ways of doing things. To fool the world! When they got to Mali, she realized that the whole population had been brainwashed to think that Gaddafi was the greatest African leader of all times. Even on this journey, he demanded his usual sex partners and Soraya wanted to have fun like the “old” slaves, so she did what they told her to do. Claim that she was menstruating, but she was also warned that Fathia, one of the monster helpers, would check her pad and that she must put red lipstick in it and dampen it somehow. She did but then she was caught by the swimming pool, poor girl! After this trip, she finally got to meet her mother for the first time in years and got to go on an excursion with Amal G. Amal G. was one of his regulars that lived outside the compound. The ones that learned that if one did as told, one could actually get something out of it.This is when she met Hicham, a handsome young man of 30, who ran one of the rides at the amusement park they went to. Unfortunately, Amal G. was not a nice woman. While having Soraya as her guest, she forced the girl to have sex with six men that paid Amal G. for the service!
We never understand what Hicham really knew about what went on at Bab al-Azizia but he helped Soraya escape. Her mother seems to have accepted that the Guide had opened her daughter and used her for his own pleasures. Or who knows what the woman thought or believed? But when Hicham tried to rescue her daughter, she condemned Soraya as a whore! 3 days after the escape, Gaddafi’s people caught up with the couple and brought Soraya back to her prison. Her father had by this time understood one or two things and after pulling a lot of strings and buying false papers, he managed to smuggle his daughter to Paris, after she had been allowed to come home now and then, to sleep at her family’s house. Her mother had during all this time treated her as a whore and a shame factor, even though she was the one that let Gaddafi’s “hunters” take her daughter five years earlier.
Soraya arrived to Paris, 20 years old, and was completely unprepared for taking care of herself. She didn’t know how to use the money wisely, that her father sent with her, and they were soon gone. She tried to get jobs, but not knowing French and only keeping to the arab sections of the city, she was doomed to fail. After 18 months she just didn’t know what to do. Hicham had told her that he was going to join her, but he never arrived so finally she gave up and flew home. And Gaddafi’s people were there to arrest her right away, bringing her back to the Guide, to get raped. Afterwards she attacked Farida, one of his “body guards”, and for some reason she was once again allowed to go home but her family was so ashamed of her that she couldn’t stay there. It is still not safe since her brothers want her dead, for the sake of their honour. She went to live with Hicham instead and they got married, but in a way that is not accepted legally. When he was called away to help in the revolution, he got killed in a NATO bombing. Or so it was said, because all others the others were found, but not his body.
Half way through the book, Cojean, goes in search of all the others. Trying to understand the pattern and what really has been going on since Gaddafi came to power in 1967. She found out that a lot of the rape victims, the kidnapped girls, his “daughters” as he called them, now are trying to survive in Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon. Their families want them dead and unfortunately the only thing they know how to do, is the oldest profession in the world. The ones that do not support themselves through prostitution abroad are the ones that were married off, by Gaddafi, to his real bodyguards. As someone said in the book, he recycled the women. Some had their hymens reconstructed and then the families were able to marry them off to some cousin, that wasn’t told of the girl’s past.
Cojean interviewed a whole lot of women or let her co-workers do so since not many of them are happy to talk. One story was as bad as the other. Like the woman Khadija who he raped, like always, and then forced in to seducing politicians so she could get him things to blackmail with. One day he chose a husband for her, she was sent to have her hymen reconstructed and happily she anticipated a normal life from then on. On her wedding day, she was ordered to Bab al-Azizia by Gaddafi. Shattered she had to go there, where he raped her again and the surgery in other words, was in vain. Another woman was Leila, who lived in misery for three years, constantly being sent for. But then she got pregnant! She was sent to Malta for an abortion and while there, the doctor reconstructed her hymen. Her pregnancy saved her, because when she got back to Libya, Gaddafi never sent for her again!
Gaddafi was a colonel with megalomania. Women and men, spoke of how he would not let anyone share the limelight with him, he wanted no competition. The Military were disgusted and their presence was just theatre. In fact, he ran the country himself. HE was Libya. When he announced the women’s rights, many women got excited. Fatima, one of the interviewed, realized what she wanted to do. She went to the Military Academy that he started for women. But when she was done with the training, she realized that women did not get anything important to do so she quit. She told Cojean that to become part of the Amazonian Guard, you had to be tall, beautiful, have long flowing hair and most important of all, Gaddafi or someone in his inner circle had to covet you. These women were all temporary mistresses, not to be mistaken for Soraya’s kind, that were kidnapped girls out of school, held like slaves. These temporary mistresses, could get a car and even a house out of it all, if they played their cards right. The real bodyguards on the other hand, were men from his own town Sirte. They were the only ones he trusted.
Many names were mentioned like Aicha Milad, that was Gaddafi’s head hunter. Milad would pick girls that drew attention, for Gaddafi to choose from. Najun al-Azrah, who worked as social minister, said that the Military Academy was from the start a trick from Gaddafi’s side to get access to young women. When other opportunities opened up for this, he lost all interest in the Academy. During the Civil War/Revolution, these neglected female soldiers, were sent in to battle. Or rather sent to check out ID-cards and cars or keep order in the long petrol queues. They were hated by both the people and the rebels which led some to desert. But if they were caught by Gaddafi’s side, they were raped and/or sent to the front to satisfy male soldiers’ sexual needs. Many were found dead under the ruins of Bab al-Azizia.
One of the things that shocked Cojean the most, was her meeting with Dr. Faisel Krekshi in 2011. He was then a 55-year-old gynecologist and professor educated in Italy and England. He was put in charge of the University in Tripoli during the rebellion and found all the files on the students, list of coming executions, but what shocked him the most, and what he just HAD to show Cojean, was the following: He showed her the big auditorium where lectures would be given but also speeches by Gaddafi, when he visited. Under the auditorium, he had found a most absurd thing that one did not expect to find under a University auditorium. He had found a bedroom with a gigantic bed, a luxury bathroom but the most surprising thing was a room, opposite these, a fully equipped gynecological room. He told Cojean that the only thing that the room could have been used for, was to do abortions and reconstruction of hymens, both forbidden in Libya. Since Gaddafi’s daughters Aicha and Hanaa were his patients, he knew of Gaddafi’s sexual habits that were a taboo for the rest of Libya. No one that knew, had dared to warn the female students! He had found 8-9 DVD-films full of Gaddafi raping girls under this particular lecture hall.
Cojean had tried to get someone at the University to talk to her, but it was hopeless since this topic is one of shame. She finally got to talk to the chief editor of Libya al-Jadida. He had a friend from a peasant family in Azizia who came to study medicine in Tripoli, in order to become a doctor. On one visit, Gaddafi put his hand on her head. The next day the body guards arrived at her home and said she had been chosen for the revolutionary guard. But her family refused. Then they resorted to threaten her brother. She finally agreed to meeting the Guide once and of course got raped. They kept her locked up for a week. The family was so humiliated that they did not allow her to come home again. She could not return to the university either so her only means of survival was to sell her body from then on, to survive. Sexual extortion was a common thing all together at the University. Not only were women sent out from Bab al-Azizia to offer money to girls to go see Gaddafi. Girls had to give themselves to professors as well, in order to pass tests or for their boyfriends’ to pass tests. Sex was used as trade, as a power instrument and personally I am utterly shocked at this since it has such horrible consequences for the women in these Muslim countries! But Gaddafi’s habits were contagious, which means that quite a few must have known after all, in his circles. The system was totally corrupt. Spies were everywhere choosing the most beautiful students, then catching them, sending them to Gaddafi and after they had been with him, they were sent on to his entourage of men. According to the editor, he had helped one girl who had got lousy grades for two years as a punishment for refusing to go to Regatta, a place where military dignities and their sons went to live a wild life. She had refused since all of Tripoli knew what went on there!
Cojean’s digging went deeper and deeper in to what had been going on and she found out that Gaddafi’s need for new sexual partners just kept growing. Of course he mostly wanted virgins. He could not get enough of them. Which made me think so much about this video clip I was sent on twitter. That Gaddafi was not the only Muslim with an unhealthy gluttony for virgins! There are many more like him! Please do not skip this part, because this needs to be seen to be believed!!! Saudi cleric obsessed with virgins and sex
I guess there were not enough virgins around for Gaddafi to have his 19 000 ones in this life? Maybe he knew that the place where he is going after this life, is NOT heaven, so he had to have them on Earth instead? Whichever, he demanded to have at least 4 men and women/day. According to the former law student Faisal, that was forced to quit his studies to go and join the other sex slaves at Bab al-Azizia, Gaddafi was very violent and took great amounts of Viagra. The women would come out of his bedroom and go straight to the hospital because of the inner injuries he had caused in them. He just could never be satisfied sexually, he was a sadist and incredibly brutal. The schools and universities were regarded by him as places with women in reserve for him and they had a constant renewal of girls and women. A paradise situation for a pedophile and rapist!
It was at the University in Benghazi that he noticed Houda ben Amer, who became the mother of his daughter Hanaa. She was a fanatic follower of his ideas. He had his wife go to the orphanage where Hanaa was kept, so he could adopt her. As if universities and schools were not enough meat markets for him, his head hunting teams scoured hair salons and wedding parties. They would film and take photographs that he later could sit and look through and choose his victims. Some girls even started avoiding going to parties where they suspected that they could get filmed by someone.
He did invade the privacy of all his employed personnel as well. His employees, chauffeurs, guards, soldiers, all of them had to film their weddings. If the Guide liked a sister or a cousin of the employed person, the latter was forced to arrange a meeting. But even worse, the same rule went if the Guide fancied the new bride! All nurses, teachers and day care centre teachers were also in the danger zone. Not strange that the co-workers who met him on a daily basis complained to Cojean saying that he was a “sex maniac. He couldn’t have a serious thought about anything else.” They tried to steer his thoughts away but “his sickly addiction made him analyze everything in the light of sex. He ruled, humiliated, enslaved and punished 
via sex.” And this is the man one can see together with smiling world politicians, when one googles his name. Did they really know who they were dealing with?
According to the book he was after two sorts of women:
1) Very young women from the lower classes, for his daily ration of sex. I would call them girls, not women. They were not a challenge to him. A special branch led by Mabrouka Sherif (whose job it was to lure female guests to his bedroom) supplied him with these. He took them by violence and some had actually been indoctrinated that it was an honour to have been opened by the Guide!
2) These were the ones he desired, the ones he wanted to conquer and rule over. His trophies. These were sought among famous singers, dancers, actors, TV-journalists from all over the middle east. He would send gifts to them and airplanes to fetch them when they had agreed to meet him. What really gave him a kick was to own powerful people, people’s wives for an hour, a night, for a couple of weeks. He loved humiliating husbands through their wives.
He was the son of a bedouin and full of hatred for the rich. He hated the aristocrats, the well-educated. And he lived out his hatred to the fullest. He forced his ministers, diplomats and high military commanders to have sex with him and if they did not, they were put to death. This was so shameful for these men that noone dared to say anything. He also made them hand over their wives and lured their daughters to come to him with money, gifts like BMWs and Jeeps, doctor exams and promises of a practice in the city centre upon graduating. everything to humiliate these men of power, that had been given so much. Which I guess he felt he had not. Pure jealousy made this man insane!
His absolute favourite sex “meals” were Head of States’ wives and daughters. There he could not use force and rape! The wives would come to him asking for contributions to their pet projects, charity things, hospitals. And he would buy them in this manner. The daughters were won over with paid for holidays, studies and business projects, just like in the case of the local powerful men’s daughters. This daughter of a former Nigerian president, was mentioned in the book, since she had a long-standing relationship with him and came along on official trips.
This woman who had worked for Protocol, said that he was a terrible disgrace for the regime. Her group would do all this planning for top meetings where Head of states would be present and thanks to him, all the planning could easily end in catastrophe. She said that they risked diplomatic incidents all the time. One time they had set up a meeting at a school because this Head of State’s wife, really wanted this. The day before the school visit, she was sent a suitcase with 500 000 Dollars and a jewelry set. When they all stood there ready the next day, to go to the school, a car drove up and took her to Bab al-Azizia for a meeting with the Guide instead. But this was not the worse incident she brought up but another one where Africa and EU was going to have a top meeting. Separate things were planned for all the wives of the politicians. Then Mabrouka Sherif arrived at the airport to look at all the photos taken of the wives arriving. She chose one and had a copy made of it, for the Guide. Soon gold was delivered to all the wives except the chosen one, who received an exquisite diamond necklace. She was the wife of an African Head of State. At the dinner, Mabrouka asked Protocol when the lady’s plane was leaving and that they must delay the departure. At 10:00 the husband waited in the airport lounge for the 11:00 flight. Protocol was terribly embarrassed seeing him pacing around. Not until 13:30 did she arrive, smiling, in a tight skirt with a broken zipper. Another time his wife Safia hosted a party for “first ladies” but on the way to this, one car suddenly pulled out of the procession and headed for Bab al-Azizia. The lady did not get back until 3:30 in the morning and her country’s security people were all in hysterics.
Not even his own cousins were safe. Sayed Kaddaf Eddam, was sent away so that Gaddafi could go on raping the cousin’s wife. She finally fled abroad, asking for a divorce, and taking their daughter with her in order to protect the daughter from the same fate.
The most interesting to read was actually Mansour Daw’s (chief of security) tale. He was the most important prisoner in Libya when Cojean was there, having been with Gaddafi and his son, to the end. He denied knowing anything at first, that Gaddafi deserved a right to a private life. He said he had never been to the cellar, where the sex slaves were kept and that he never went on any of the trips with the false bodyguards. When asked about some of the names he said that Nouri Mesmari, the general of the special forces, went looking for women everywhere for Gaddafi. That Mabrouka Sherif practiced black magic and that he always refused to shake her hand. For someone who claimed to know so little, it is interesting to read that he saw to that noone but himself or his sons drove his wife to different places. Gaddafi was family but Daw did not invite him to his son’s wedding. He held the party at his house instead of the customary hotel, because then Gaddafi would have been able to look for women in the hotel’s surveillance films. He had a female orchestra at the wedding, female organizers, 100% female staff and no mobile phones were allowed so that no photos would filter out to Gaddafi. This man did not know what Gaddafi did right??? He saw to protecting his family and all his female extended family from the sex monster!
The more I read, the more I realized that all of Libya’s structure was set up to do only one thing: Supply Gaddafi with sex partners! But he was not content with just Libya. The chief of the stately radio and TV was asked to lure international TV-stars and reporters to Libya. I guess Gaddafi trusted his own charm to do the rest? When he was travelling to other countries, he always made sure to be present to different women’s organisations. From these groups he set up a network of women that had to find him new women, to be sent to Libya. Pappa Muammar was to pay for their holidays to Libya, which was advertised as a paradise for women.
The chauffeur for Protocol, Hussein, related that he drove like a shuttle service between the luxury hotel Mehari in Tripoli to Bab al-Azizia. The women were all 20 years old and from all over Libya, Lebanon, Irak, the Persian Gulf countries, Bosnia, Serbia, Belgium, Italy, France and the Ukraine. When he drove them back to the hotel, some looked happy, others broken down. Did they know what awaited? Well, the Ukrainian nurse Galina was sent to the hotel in advance to take blood tests on them all and some girls had found it odd but there were always explanations that he was particular about his health and afraid of disease… Hussein did add the shocking information why he had quit finally. One girl had opened a bag full of dollars. She had taken a hundred-dollar bill out and used it to snort cocaine in the back seat while he was driving and when he though about how that was a whole… salary for him, he decided to quit the job.
Photo models, naturally, were Gaddafi’s dream. In order to get to them, he supported fashion designers and organized fashion shows all the time. After all, these women were not wearing veils! At a meeting in Rome, he requested an all female audience and the women had to be 170 cm tall and wear high heels. One woman who had attended said he tried to make them all convert to Islam. Question is why? He did not live like a Muslim so why did he want them all to convert to a religion that he did not follow or believe in?
At this point in the book, Cojean decided to present Mabrouka Sherif, Soraya’s kidnapper, her prison guard, the executioner. She was described by Libyans as lacking all empathy and compassion. That was an understatement after reading the first half of the book!!! Someone described her as the worse possible brothel madam. French security service called her a recruiter, in their papers because she came to Paris to “shop” for women. She was constantly hunting for women to bring back to Libya and Gaddafi. I still can’t understand how a woman could turn that evil? She is beyond belief! Cojean dived in to her past and she did come from an aristocratic family, the Sherifs of Tuareq family. She was raised by slaves. She was engaged to be married to an aristocrat but suddenly she was married off to a Massoud Abdel Haffiz, a member of Gaddafi’s tribe who was already married to Gaddafi’s cousin. He soon asked for a divorce whereupon Mabrouka ran off to Tripoli. In 1999 she got employed by Protocol for an African top meeting with 30 leaders and their wives. She brought the delegation from Guinea to the Guide and never returned to her job at Protocol. She was given unlimited power over the harem in the cellar, she became the official deliverer of prey and the chief of the special forces/body guards. When the revolution succeeded, she went and hid in Ghat with her mother, and she has been forgiven all her sins by the rebel leaders because “she seems like a good person that was put in charge of too much”.
Former attorney general Mohammed al-Alagi told Cojean that when the rebels started their revolution, Gaddafi’s orders were “rape, then kill”. Which is what his soldiers did. Female young children, everyone… Boxes of Viagra were found all over, afterwards, at all places where soldiers had been stationed.
Cojean was told that LOW PROFILE was the key word for survival if you were a woman in Gaddafi’s Libya. If you were too successful as a woman, someone might notice you = this would lead to rape, kidnapping and forced marriage. A girl knew that you must not stand out, not be too good, not too intelligent, not talented nor beautiful. A girl had to keep ambitions low, not go for high status jobs and not speak out in public. If you did so, you would end up in Gaddafi’s bedroom!
The end of the book describes very shortly how Gaddafi tried to escape justice, when his day came, and how his people delighted in watching the You Tube videos over and over, where he is killed. But only few knew about a very special film that showed the rapist getting raped before he was killed, where someone stuck a metal rod up his anus. I can’t say I pity him! I think he got a way too easy end. He should have been brought to justice! But I do pity all the women. The girls that were robbed of a life. When the Russians marched on Berlin in 1945, they raped all the women on their way and Berlin was not safe after their arrival. The soldiers couldn’t get enough. But they had been away from home for 6 years and not been allowed any communication with their families, since this was Russian policy. They drank themselves in to a stupor before raping and they always travelled in groups. These women did survive the rapes. Mainly, I think because it happened to them ALL. They could share their experiences and their grief on the streets, waiting in the water queues. But what they went through was not what these women in Libya has been through. Women that took his money, his gifts, were no better than prostitutes. But the girls, the young virgins, kidnapped out of school or taken from the University or Military Academy, they were never given any options. They were prey of a madman, their only sin was that they were born girls. And to go back in to Muslim society has become impossible for them. As if it is not bad enough that no man will ever want to marry them, in a society where that is for the most part the only option a girl has, their families want to see them dead because they are said to have shamed their families. This is catastrophe! It is unfair. And what is the world doing for them? What can one do? The day Gaddafi raped, was the day the girl’s life ended. These girls have no life to return to. It is strange that we have not heard of some sort of mass-suicide in Libya. Soraya was 22 in 2011, a time in life when you are so full of hope and yet, Soraya has to hide from her brothers that are set to kill her. She asked Cojean how old she thought Soraya was, because she looked like an old woman. Her body was ruined and especially her breasts looked like an old woman’s because Gaddafi bit them and kneaded them so often that they just became droopy things. Maybe Soraya is still alive, but since she has never had any education and has never been taught how to take care of herself, she is more than likely a woman that sells her body to survive and this is so terribly tragic. Gaddafi taught her to drink, smoke and use drugs, so maybe she is surviving by numbing her pain? I am just glad, that women like her, and some people from those days, men as well as women, dare to speak. Maybe it can make the families of Libya wake up and see, like the Berlin women, that they are not alone in this. One can only hope that many reads this book and others that might be written in the future. Education is the best way against prejudice! If people had not hidden behind traditions, culture and their religious fanaticism there would have been plenty of people to help Soraya! Including her family that ought to have known her better than to think that she had bad morals!!!! They should have been there, got her counseling, still should. Libya now has a nation full of raped girls that need help, not accusations, judging and stone throwing.
My oldest daughter asks why I read terrible books like this. Difficult to explain to a self-centered teenager but in a way I feel it is my duty. As a citizen on this planet, I ought to know what is going on in the world around me. I think we see daily what happens when people get narrow-minded and live in their own bubbles. You can’t if you are going to call yourself one of God’s children. These other people are so, as much as you are. And to read about the fate of others, teaches compassion and empathy. Something that there is a great lack of in this world! We need more of it. And what is the purpose of shielding yourself from the truth? How does it help others? Sure, the world is an ugly place, but it does not become a better place because you hide behind one of those protection patches one puts on horses!
Millies Swedish Journal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.