(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Boys who are as young as 11 are turning to suicide after failing to receive the necessary emotional support following sexual abuse, a lawyer has claimed.
Manar Al Tamimi, a lawyer who specialises in sexual assault claims, said that she knew of 25 cases where rape or molestation victims had attempted suicide over the past seven years '" or an average of more than three per year, reported a local daily.
'Most of the victims were teenage boys who had been raped either in a school, park or in their neighbourhood,' she said.
'I saw at least four cases where boys as young as 11 were raped in school by other pupils.'
'These young children are then the talk of the school and mocked by other children until they cannot handle the pressure of their ordeal.'
'Even with help from psychiatrists these children often require more attention and try to hurt themselves as a cry for help.'
'Sometimes their parents do not know how to deal with the issue and end up not dealing with it at all.'
'After the physical and emotional ordeal the victims cannot handle life and end up trying to kill themselves.'
Al Tamimi said one of her clients, aged 14, had dropped out of school after being raped in a toilet on the campus. 'He was raped by four other teenagers in a school bathroom,' she said.
Although harsh punishments of up to life imprisonment are often handed out to rapists in Bahrain, this does little to help the victim's emotional state, Al Tamimi said.
'The law ensures punishments that will see attackers put behind bars for a long time, but the victims and their families never completely recover even after the court's verdict,' she said.
'Sometimes family members and people closely related to the victims are the rapists.'
'It's never the ones closest to you that you expect to hurt you and take advantage of you, which is why judges usually hand out the maximum punishment in such cases.'
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