The last thing Amanda remembered was someone putting ice in her drink. The next thing she knew, she was in a hotel room covered in bruises with several broken ribs.
She was told that during the night security guards had heard her screaming and had broken down the door to find three men in her room.
Later, she learned from a doctor that she had been brutally raped.
The 27-year-old Australian national had been working as a hotel manager at the exclusive Le Meridien Al Aqah Beach Resort in Fujairah, a province in the United Arab Emirates, where the attack took place.
She had expected local police in the Arab state to investigate the offense. Instead, she was accused of adultery and was sentenced to 12 months in jail in Dubai.
“I was in jail for two months before I went to court and the whole time I didn’t know what the charges were,” she told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper in Australia. “I had a lawyer, but he didn’t speak English.”
Amanda’s experience is not unique. In 2003, a French woman was also convicted of adultery after claiming that she had been gang-raped.
In January this year, a British woman said that she was “taunted” by police after reporting an alleged rape in Dubai, the most modern of the seven-emirate country.
“I was taken into a room at the station with about five police officers, all men,” she told the Sun newspaper.
“They were sniggering. I was crying. I felt utterly humiliated. I was treated like a criminal, like filth.”
Instead of investigating her allegations, she and her fiance were accused of sex outside of marriage and threatened with jail if she did not drop the charges.
“I was scared. I obviously still believe I was raped but the only way out was to sign something saying I wasn’t, so I did it,” she said, after returning to the U.K.
The fear of being convicted of adultery if there is not 100 percent proof of rape has caused many women to fear reporting the crime to police.
According to Iman Ouaddani, a lawyer with the Abu Dhabi-based firm Al Otaiba, some 70 percent of rape cases in the UAE go unreported, local media reported.
The attitude of the UAE police forces to rape has also attracted international attention. The U.S.-based NGO Freedom House said that the lack of citizenship status for foreign workers renders them vulnerable in the face of the law.
“A significant number of noncitizen victims of abuse have been reluctant to report rapes, assaults, and other crimes, fearing that they could jeopardize their residency status and risk deportation,” the organization’s country report stated.
“The lack of official data on this matter exacerbates the problem because the government feels no need to implement countermeasures.”
There are few women’s organizations that directly deal with victims of sexual abuse in the UAE. One of those which does—the UAE Women’s Federation—is state-sponsored.
However officials from the federation claim to have worked with police in fostering greater awareness of the status of women suffering sexual abuse.
Sixty police officers who work with sex crime victims were reported to have taken part in a two-day training session on handling vulnerable witnesses in October.
It is not known whether any of those officers met with the British women who claimed rape just two months later.
Angie Conroy, the policy officer at Rape Crisis England and Wales, told the UAE daily newspaper The National that there was “no bigger deterrent” to coming forward to make a rape allegation than the fear of a potential prosecution.
“No victim of rape can turn up at a police station and prove without a shadow of a doubt that they have been raped,” she said.
“If women think there is a danger they could be sent to prison unless they can 100 percent prove it, obviously it’s going to stop them from going and making a complaint.
“It is a difficult enough process to go through to report a rape, without having the threat of prison hanging over you.”
