Decency Standards

Standards are a blend of place and time and a people’s culture. Religion also bears heavily on standards. And there’s tradition.

A bikini-clad woman pushing a shopping cart in a beachside supermarket in Honolulu isn’t a strange sight.  Transport that sight to our local malls, or for that matter to New York’s Madison Avenue, and it would create a stir.  That same sight would merit jail time followed by deportation (if one is a foreigner) in Dubai.

Even as a secularized world-class city, Dubai, and the whole UAE, has its limits when it comes to indecency. Westernized female foreigners may not be required to wear black robes over their day clothes in public unlike Iran and Saudi Arabia, but ample cover in order not to scandalize locals is at least expected.

A lady Westerner crossed a street and snagged further an already gnarled traffic because her blouse was sheer and she was braless.  That became writing fodder for newspapers.

But a more blazing news that merited front page space for days in major broadsheets was a young British couple, a male tourist and a female expat worker, who were caught in a very compromising act on the beach.  Both are now in jail while their case is being heard.  Despite getting married at once after they were caught, their private act done in public remains a crime.

Indecency is one of the crimes Filipino expats here are jailed for, like pregnancies without husbands.  If the babies are due during the incarceration period, authorities take these women to the hospital and bring them back to jail after delivery, together with their newborns.  They are deported only after serving time.

The husband was once asked in one meeting with the Filipino community why the consulate can’t do more to help in these cases.  He was piqued by the question.

We need to know that we go to a foreign land and respect the host country’s laws as we expect foreigners who come to our country to respect our own laws. We (government representatives like him) are not here to help people commit crimes and dodge laws.

I asked what then was his answer to the question. He said that we can visit them in jail and help them with the required paperwork for their deportation, but there was laughter when he added that when these women were at the peak of happiness they never thought of the consulate.  When they’re in hot waters, there’s the consulate to blame for not saving them from jail!

Too bad there aren’t enough men in the consulate to marry these women with unwanted pregnancies. Besides, my understanding is that authorities here check the period from the wedding date to the baby’s delivery date of the newly married. So pre-marital activities that may be a crime are still found out.

At home, flashing the middle finger may earn one a bloody nose at most. In the UAE it means a jail stint.

To say that certain countries or cultures have moral and legal standards that are more backward than others is arrogant. I can’t tell how much our fellow nationals bothered to know when they don spaghetti-strapped or backless dresses here.  It’s safer to avoid sleeveless street clothes all together.

Respect for differences means that neither side condemns the other.  Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow Christian churches to be built on its soil.  Rome doesn’t allow Islamic mosques on its terrain.  All’s well.

The UAE as an Arab and Islamic country at least has Christian churches in its midst.  The biggest Catholic church in Dubai fills to the rafters and sits right beside a big mosque. Sometimes, the church bells peal together with the Muslim call to prayer. Trouble is farthest from these two kinds of worship.

If this mutual tolerance could happen here, so could it happen anywhere else.  Meanwhile, sensitivity to local mores can do wonders to one’s safety in a foreign land.

(7 Sept 2008)