There have been a number of disturbing news stories about the UAE lately, most recently, a woman who reported being raped by six men has been charged with having sex outside of wedlock.  Before that it was revealed that an imam was found guilty of sexually abusing an eight year old boy and three others (and one non-religious teacher) are awaiting trial on similar charges.  A woman was arrested in Bahrain because she kidnapped her own daughter after her ex-husband had the child's genitals ritually mutilated in Dubai.  An Emirati police officer was convicted of rape even after he claimed he couldn't have done it because the victim was too fat.  Two Emirati boy racers who killed another driver were sentenced to three months in jail and a moderate payment of blood money to the family and a man was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a four year old boy in a mosque.

There are two common threads to these cases i) they are each, disgusting and shameful abuses of the victim ii) we know about them.  These are exactly the kind of cases one would expect in the past to have been thoroughly covered up, swept under the carpet and the culprits either released with a slap on the wrist or disappeared to become the stuff of UAE urban legend.

The reporting is of course, a study in careful neutrality and the level of publicity is nowhere near that of the relatively harmless sex-on-the-beach tabloid scandal, the two ex-pats sentenced to a month in jail and deportation for a kiss (witnessed only by a child under the age of five) or even the growing number of ex-pats given jail time in return for giving the dreaded FINGER to awful Arab drivers, but they are being reported and that's the start of a powerful force for progress.

Though the extreme cases are universally revolting, public outrage about them is muted as you would probably expect in a country that doesn't technically have freedom of speech, and where the majority of the population are ex-pats with limited interest in the country's ethical and cultural growth.  But with Dubai in particular pinning its hopes on tourism, the world now knows where the UAE is and should be quietly keeping an eye on what happens here because it might well affect its holiday plans.