Hala Al-Qahtani

Alsharq





When an expatriate worker commits a crime he is imprisoned, fined, lashed or deported. This is quite reasonable. But how can we allow the same person to come back to the country to work as a bus driver in a girls’ school and then commit a heinous crime three times? This is catastrophic.



When investigators produced the criminal before his victim, an 11-year-old girl, to identify him, she cried hysterically and fainted on seeing the man. He had molested the girl on three different occasions while driving her from home to school and back. Investigators then asked the criminal to get out of the room for fear of the girl’s health.



Although the criminal could be sentenced to death by a criminal court, he deserves to die more than once because of the heinous crime he has committed. His bones should be crushed again and again for destroying an innocent girl and her future. She will remember the incident forever and it will have a negative impact throughout her life.



We should not allow such crimes to pass unnoticed, especially when we see the lukewarm public reaction to the press report on the incident. However, it has left deep pain in the minds of mothers like me.



When the law allowed young women to work as salespersons at shops, authorities should have provided female drivers to transport them to avoid incidents of sexual abuse.



As women are not allowed to drive, some families even forced to hire illegal foreign drivers.



An individual is appointed as family driver without even asking his professional background. Anyone who can hold the steering wheel is hired as a family driver paying scant attention to its dangerous consequences. So when a driver commits a crime, he alone is not responsible.



Security agencies said the driver who molested the Jeddah girl had a criminal history. If that is true who allowed him to re-enter the Kingdom, even after he was fingerprinted. If he was appointed as a school bus driver, why did they not check his background before allowing him to transport girls?



How was this criminal able to rape a little girl on three occasion by taking her to makeshift house in a crowded neighborhood without the knowledge of her family, or anyone else for that matter? Parents used to ask school authorities when their children did not return home on time. How can a girl arrive late three times without her mother asking for the reason? We should commend the female school principal who found out the girl’s sad plight by reading her face and informed the police about the crime.



This is not an isolated incident. Such crimes are increasing day by day. People like me cannot forget the incident in which a 50-year-old school driver raped a 5-year-old girl near her nursery school in Riyadh.



Another driver of a school bus, who was an illegal resident, had assaulted an 8-year-old girl also in Riyadh and threatened her that he would kill her if she had disclosed the incident to anyone.



The biggest tragedy is that the Education Ministry did not do anything to prevent such incidents. Subsequently, sexual abuse of girl students is recurring. In my opinion, the ministry has a big responsibility in preventing such incidents, not by just appointing elderly drivers but by taking other precautionary measures such as installing cameras inside school buses and appointing a woman guard to look after girls in every bus. If we ignore such little things, we will end up facing big tragedies.