Marcus Fakana sentenced to a year in prison

[Zippedydodah]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles]]]]
I cannot believe that this lad is going to spend a year in prison- yes, I know that’s the law there, he should have known better etc, etc
I hope that the girl’s mother is ashamed of her actions.
I don’t want to think what the impact will be on Marcus 😥

Well when I'm being tagged and personal attacks made, inferring I'm racist then yes I do want to defend myself thanks.

The problem is Dubai is positioning itself as a materialistic, western holiday destination where its all murky and wink wink where the local laws are and are not enforced depending on your sex, race, and wealth.

So if they are serving tourists alcohol and permitting immodest dress in tourist areas by tourists then a teenager could be forgiven for assuming that their other laws are on paper only. Except they are enforced as and when it suits the Saudis.

If I was offered a holiday in Dubai for free you would not get me on the plane.

At 19.56 you said you were leaving the thread because you'd said 'your piece'

Why are you still here???

People have ‘grasped that fact’ so you keep repeating that they haven’t over and over again doesn’t make it true.

We can feel empathy and want compassion for a young man to not have his life ruined despite him technically breaking a law.

It does seem it’s you who is continually missing the point - deliberately I would imagine

But we’re also supposed to save our tears for drug smugglers and murderers otherwise we’re not grasping the point apparently

Indeed. Nothing of value is being contributed. Must be very bored…

I thanked you for helping keep this thread in active! That wasn’t a personal attack, I mean it!

I am now very bored. You seem obsessed with me @Plastictrees

@icelolly12 If you’re very bored then leave, absolutely bizarre behaviour 😂😂😂

💯- a couple of horny teenagers are expected to witness the excess, sexual behaviour, alcohol etc in Dubai having a blind eye turned due to the cash it creates and fully understand the implications of a consensual shag in a hotel car park when they’re seeing far worse all around d them.

🤣🤣🤣

And you seem obsessed by Marcus and this thread, not the girl’s nutty mother are you? 🤦‍♀️

Utterly baffling, isn't it? I had a quick look at the link provided, and one of the people we're supposed to be weeping over took £1.6 million worth of cocaine to Indonesia, one of the countries that everyone knows has draconian drug laws. Imagine the cost of human misery in that sordid operation. It's a trillion miles from being in the same moral universe as a young man having a consensual relationship with a woman only slightly younger than himself. There are times I simply cannot comprehend some of the posts on MN.

Anyone stupid enough to go to Dubai deserves all they get.

Oh dear, now you’ve resorted to name calling - which is what you accused another poster of doing earlier 😂

Yeah, they really don’t.

It's not about not understanding the basic principle of the law (we all understand that you get criminalised if you break the law), it's about the fact that this is quite obviously an unjust case, and an example where the law is prosecuting a clearly innocent young person using a law which ought to be used for pedophiles. It is actually horrifying that Marcus has been prosecuted, and this is an experience which will not only scar him for life but leave him seriously disadvantaged (what job is going to hire someone who technically had sex with a minor?)

While obviously everyone should respect the law, there's nothing wrong with critiquing it, or being horrified by miscarriages of justice. If we all said, 'well it's the law, your fault if you break it' and didn't complain/critique we'd still have completely archaic laws in place.

I agree.
The instragrammers won’t be put off though 😞

As I said I certainly do have empathy for him and as you say no-one was harmed. But laws are different in different places. In parts of the world women can be stoned for being raped. This could happen to a British woman visiting that country. I’ve travelled all over the world and lived in the Middle East when my husband worked there. The laws of the country apply within that country and can’t be ignored because a British person breaks them. The same is true when someone from the UAE visits here.
The real villain in this is the vicious mother of the “under age” girl involved.

I guess Marcus should have known better, as pretty much everyone knows how strict Dubai is with stuff like this. But I do feel very sorry for him, and hope someone intervenes and gets him out of prison soon!

As a pp said, multiple rapes and under age sex happens (behind closed doors usually) and nothing is done, yet an 18 year old male had consensual sex with a female a few months younger than him, and he's in jail.

I agree with pps that the villain of the piece here is the hideous mother of the girl!

I feel so sorry for this young man and his family who must be going through hell. I know nothing about Dubai prisons but I imagine it's going to be a very tough year for him. Am I being totally naïve in thinking people can write to him?

Nice idea, but I doubt it would be allowed,

https://www.itv.com/news/2023-02-16/my-dubai-holiday-ended-with-traumatising-three-month-stretch-in-prison

This is interesting. Such awful racism over there. This lady was jailed for a year for posting a picture of government officials at the airport on her Twitter (after being detained and having her passport taken away for no good reason).

Her sentence was reduced after a social media campaign and involvement from her local parliamentary representative. So I do hope with a bit of publicity something can be done here.

Shocking also the reasons people were put in prison. And the corrupt nature of the police there - making people sign confessions in Arabic for example.

I think it’s worth going over all this with any teenagers who may be travelling in the next few years. Definitely not a place to visit. There needs to be a backlash against Dubai.

There does need to be. I went to Dubai a few times as a teenager (a school friend moved there with her family) and I was completely naive, I’m lucky nothing terrible happened. We definitely need to be talking about these cases more, and the archaic and often misogynistic laws and practices. I know quite a few people who’ve moved from the UK to Dubai as they offer great pay packages for teachers who relocate.

We may think that having a UK passport offers some protection but of course that is not the case, and once you are detained in another country you are at their mercy. The PR for Dubai has been very effective which is why it attracts so many influencers and more affluent people. I would like to think that people would feel differently about going to Dubai if they were confronted with the awful realities of the legal system and what could happen. We tend to feel like it will never happen to us though - but it very well could.

I won’t be visiting again.