Part Three: A Culturally Clever, Bacha Bazi Predator
Editor: This series of guest columns by ‘Pungentpeppers’ about refugees who are also child predators has been wildly popular. Part II went through the roof yesterday via facebook. Below is the next installment as we pick up the story of perhaps Australia’s most infamous pedophile. (You may want to read Part I first about America’s own Bacha Bazi predator.)
Part Three: A Culturally Clever, Bacha Bazi Predator
In Part Two — It’s May 2014. Child predator Omid Roshan sits behind bars, but Ali Jaffari is roaming free. Melbourne residents report sightings of the Afghan sex offender. He seems to be everywhere! The public is on high alert.
Afghan men do not think of women as sex objects, how could they when the women are covered. Woe to the young boys. Photo:
“Jaffari should not be on the streets,” child protection activists agree. But amid calls for his deportation, one Melbourne-area activist is concerned that, if Australia deports him, Jaffari will harm children in his home country. She says, “We can’t let child abuse travel.” (See theHerald Sun, here).
But child abuse has already traveled — from Afghanistan to Australia.
Bacha Bazi, or sexual abuse of boys, introduced in Part One of this series, is pervasive and culturally accepted in Afghanistan. The country has more pedophiles per capita than any other place on earth. It has been going on there for centuries, and is so ingrained that Afghan men do not think of women as sex objects. After all, “How can you fall in love with a woman if you can’t see her face?!”
The abusive practice is most common among Pashtuns – perhaps as many as 50% of Pashtun men take boys for lovers – but it is also prevalent among other Afghan ethnic populations, including the groups to which our two featured sex offenders belong. Omid Roshan is likely a Tajik; while Ali Jaffari is a Hazara.
Jaffari is not the naive and innocent bumpkin he pretends to be…
The widespread acceptance of Bacha Bazi in his country may have given Ali Jaffari the idea that he could exploit his cultural background to evade punishment for misbehaving in Australia. Thus, after his arrest for molesting the boys in the pool, two months later he feigns innocence and disingenuously tells police in Geelong, as he is stopped after trying to kidnap the little girl: “for us is not an issue”.
Jaffari is not the naive and innocent bumpkin he pretends to be, albeit he grew up poor and uneducated in a rural part of Afghanistan’s Ghazni province. After his father was shot dead in 2003 (Jaffari was in his mid-20’s), his family fled to Pakistan. Although the odds were stacked against him, Jaffari found opportunity and exploited it to personal advantage. Motivated to travel to Indonesia, he collected the immense sum demanded by smugglers to pay for passage by boat to Australia – no small feat. During 15 months of detention, Jaffari learned the stratagems required to win permanent asylum and benefits from the Australians – and was successful.
Given his past wins at the Australian game, it’s no surprise that during the long intervals between arrests and court appearances, the ever resourceful Ali Jaffari devises his “cultural” strategy. And the Australian magistrates, oh so understanding and wanting to be culturally aware, lap up Jaffari’s concocted tale of innocence, deprivation and loneliness — and so they fail to lock up the conniving predator who had the audacity to frighten a woman and her children by following them through a park at night, making noises and touching himself.
Will the courts finally stop Jaffari? Or will the government step in?
And why won’t the Afghans stop the hideous practices that bring shame to their nation? Does the reason have something to do with Islam?
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