A TEENAGER yesterday became the seventh woman to sit in court and watch the men who had gang raped her convicted of their crimes.

Most of the seven have never met. They are victims of 14 young males who now have been convicted or pleaded guilty to five different gang rapes and sexual assaults in western Sydney over two months two years ago. Many of the women, including yesterday's victim, who can only be called D, had to go to court each day and confront the attackers who degraded them and stole their sense of security.

The attacks were investigated by Strike Force Sayda, a police unit set up in late-August 2000 to look at a series of gang rapes in western Sydney by males of Lebanese origin. Some of the attacks had included racial taunts to the victims.

The other attacks include:

August 4, when a 14-year-old girl was approached by four males on a train, who asked for oral sex, thrust a condom packet in her face and one exposed his penis. At Punchbowl station she managed to escape, but only after one of the men told another man in a mobile phone call: "I've got a slut with me bro, come to Punchbowl;"

August 10 when two girls, 17 and 18, were taken to Northcote Park at Greenacre and forced to repeatedly perform oral sex upon eight males;

August 12, the case involving D who was taken to Gosling Park, Greenacre where a total of 14 males gathered. She was held down and raped by two, threatened at gunpoint before she managed to escape;

August 30, when an 18-year-old was raped by a group of 14 males at three western Sydney locations in a six-hour ordeal. During this she was called an "Aussie pig" and told "I'm going to f .. k you Leb style"; and

September 5, when two 16-year-old girls were taken to a Villawood home and repeatedly raped by three males at knifepoint.

Story of courage ... a 16-year-old girl, left, raped at a Greenacre park on August 12, and an 18-year-old girl raped over six hours at three western Sydney locations on August 30.

As you say - they have yet to be sentenced. Sentences for sexual assault in Australia are usually light. Note this comical sentence in the report: "M had been admitted to the jail hospital suffering an anti-social personality disorder." His personality has become an illness! Translated, this is an early bid for a reduced sentence because of his "health problems."


So now we know the facts, straight from the Supreme Court, that a group of Lebanese Muslim gang rapists from south-western Sydney hunted their victims on the basis of their ethnicity and subjected them to hours of degrading, dehumanising torture. The young women, and girls as young as 14, were "sluts" and "Aussie pigs", the rapists said. So now that some of the perpetrators are in jail, will those people who cried racism and media "sensationalism" hang their heads in shame? Hardly.

The journalists, academics, legal brains and politicians who tried to claim last August that the gang rapes of south-western Sydney were just a run-of-the-mill police blotter story being beaten up by racists, scaremongers and political opportunists don't ever want to acknowledge the truth about that ugly episode in Australian history. They don't want to acknowledge the fear and tension that ran through a part of Sydney they rarely visit and can never understand.

In August, when Judge Megan Latham handed out laughably lenient sentences to three men in one gang rape case, which were later more than doubled on appeal, she made a special point of debunking the race link: "There is no evidence before me of any racial element in the commission of these offences," she said. "There is nothing said or done by the offenders which provides the slightest basis for imputing to them some discrimination in terms of the nationality of their victims."

Except that later one of the victims complained her victim impact statement had been "censored" of any "ethnic" references by prosecutors intent on a plea bargain. She was convinced she was raped because of her ethnicity. "You deserve it because you're an Australian," the rapists told her during the five-hour attack.

It's just so inconvenient of the victims to insist on telling the truth.

"I looked in his eyes. I had never seen such indifference," one 18-year-old victim, codenamed Miss C, told the court, remembering one of the 14 men who called her "Aussie pig", gang raped her 25 times over a six-hour period in Bankstown and Chullora, and then turned a hose on her. "I'm going to f*** you Leb style," he said.

Fourteen gang rapists have been convicted, or pleaded guilty, thanks to the courage of seven victims who testified for days in court as their tormentors smirked nearby, the men's families threatened them and defence lawyers suggested they had enjoyed the rapes.

There were encouraging signs by the end of the week that some Muslim community leaders were talking of "Muslims accepting responsibility that they may have failed to do things that would have prevented these things from happening", as Amjad Mehboob, chief executive for the Federation of Islamic Councils, told ABC Radio on Friday.

Case study 8 in the issues paper concerns a migrant man who murdered his 16-year-old daughter because she was having sexual relations with a young man with whom she wanted to live. The father found the two together in the boyfriend's bedroom and he stabbed his daughter to death. He was found guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter because, as a "traditional Muslim", he was understandably angry at his daughter's affront to his patriarchal authority. The judge said that in this case the "ordinary person" the jury imagined had to be "an ordinary man of Mr Dincer's [the defendant's] origin, background and beliefs".

"The commission will be looking at ways to negotiate the difficulties of framing the [ordinary person] test in a multicultural and heterogenous society." I wish it wouldn't. Or, at least, before it does so, it should familiarise itself with what the Koran has to say about women and ask itself if we want to bend our perceptions of the value of female life to fit with this: "Men have authority over women because God has made one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient . . . As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them."

Before well-meaning and soft-hearted people rush to make the law of homicide culturally relative, they had best ask themselves how they feel about standing aside while men beat their disobedient wives. Cultural relativism has no place in a civilised society. We are not bound to make room for barbarism, even when it dresses itself up in the fluffy rhetoric of multiculturalism.