Facebook terror gang case raises many issues

I recently read about a gang that had been arrested in Sharjah. This gang called itself "Death Room". The gang had five members between the ages of 20 and 25 years. Two of the members were of Pakistani nationality, with the other three possessing no nationality documents.

These five psychopaths developed a strategy to make money, which was based on aggressively luring school children, primarily from well-to-do south Asian families, to remote areas. Then they would strip these children of all their clothes, torture them and film them being tortured. They would use the footage they filmed to blackmail these children into paying money to the gang on a monthly basis.

These psychopaths would also threaten the victims, saying that should they not pay, their family members would be kidnapped. They also forced these children to volunteer the names of fellow students who could also be attacked.

What really disturbed me was the nature of their crime, and what really angered me was that this type of crime was taking place in our society.

All crimes are heinous, but the most monstrous and inhuman crimes are those perpetuated against children - it takes a really depraved coward to attack a child, and these crimes leave emotional scars on a child that can have long-lasting effects.

The case of this gang raises many issues. First, the fact that we have yet fully to institutionalise a quality control mechanism pertaining to controlling and tracking the quality of people entering the country. For example, not anyone can get a visa to go to the US, there are tight regulations and screening procedures.

Granted, no system is perfect, but we need to ensure that we have a unified and strictly implemented system of screening across the emirates which tightly regulates and tracks people coming in through the visit visa and work visa systems in addition to tracking down those who enter illegally or reside illegally.

Secondly, this gang took advantage of the fact that many families didn't speak up about what happened to their child, seeing it as a shameful thing to acknowledge it and thinking that silence and allowing it to pass was better.

We need to crush this "shame culture" mentality, where the victim must remain silent because to speak would bring shame on the family.

This mentality often disables children from being able to speak up about abuse that they may face in life, whether physical or sexual. We need to break the silence, and learn how critical it is to speak to our children about everything, and to encourage them to speak freely to us, because in this world they will come across everything and when there is healthy communication no one can secretly prey on children or victimise people, because no one will remain silent.

Thirdly, there's a need for people to realise that if they break the law they will pay a heavy price. That is the message that is obviously not rippling strongly enough in our society, because these psychopaths were spitting in the face of our security system, and our legal system, assuming that they could behave and act with impunity. And for six months they were getting away with it.

Fourthly, the majority of the gang members were people who did not carry any nationality documents, or as we refer to in Arabic as bidoon, and this is an indicator that such groups can pose a real threat to the social fabric if their cases are not dealt with in terms of either identifying their country of origin so that they may return there, or through integrating them into society.

This gang reminded us that in our world there are people who live among us who totally disregard the sanctity of life and have lost the capacity to feel compassion, and this is why they behave like psychopaths.

I do believe that people can be reformed, and I am certain if we dig into the pasts of these psychopaths we will find that most probably in their own childhood they were exposed to things that should have not happened, or that they were not raised with a moral or ethical foundation to help them restrain themselves from becoming human beings that hurt others.

Depending on the nature of the crime, social contract and human decency obliges us to work on fundamentally reforming individuals who have the capacity and will to change.

However, also based on the nature of the crime, I believe in an iron fist when it comes to protecting the lives of innocent people, and especially children.

Niccolo Machiavelli, the 15th century political philosopher, posed the question whether it was better for a prince to be feared or loved, and in this case I would pose the question whether it is better for a society and a system to be feared or loved, and I believe that when it comes to the rule of law, it must be a balance between both - that yes, we love that there is a legal system that will protect you, you are innocent till proven guilty, but once you have been proven guilty, and depending on the nature of the crime, the law will show no mercy to those who have forsaken their humanity.

Najla Al Awadhi is a member of the Federal National Council.