Haunting music video begs public to fight child rape

The video ends with a young girl facing the camera and crying as she holds up her bloody hands.
The video ends with a young girl facing the camera and crying as she holds up her bloody hands.

Fury over the prevalence of sexual assault has gripped Myanmar over the last two months, especially as rapes of girls between the ages of two and 10 years old have appeared in several headlines.

This heightened consciousness has birthed several strategies to combat sexual violence, with some groups petitioning the government to give the death penalty to rapists and others trying to take the law into their own hands, such as when a mob gathered in Mandalay last week to demand that the police hand an alleged rapist over to them.

READ: Meet the women who want at least a few rapists to be executed

One group, however, has chosen to fight sexual violence with persuasion rather than coercion, begging society to “stop the rapes” in a haunting music video.

The video, directed and starring Demo Jacktoo, has been shared over 42,000 times. The chorus of the song pleads:

Please stop, stop the rapes.
Please stop, stop the rapes.
Our blood, our sons, and our children,
let us all work together to protect them.
Please stop, stop the rapes.
Please stop, stop the rapes.
Our women and our children,
Please live like we are all brothers and sisters
and protect them.

Due to the nature of Burmese grammar, this message is made all the more powerful by the ambiguousness of who the song is meant to address; it seems to be speaking both to those who are doing the assaulting and to those who are in positions to stop it.

The song ends on a similarly vague note, instructing the viewer: “Don’t let it be because of you that a child’s life is ruined.”

The lyrics are accompanied by a video showing the traumatic effect a sexual assault had on a young girl and her family, interspersed with footage of the singers and their supporters holding up signs, passing out flyers, and speaking to people to raise awareness of this issue. The video ends with the young girl facing the camera and crying as she holds up her bloody hands for all the world to witness her pain.

Though Myanmar netizens are often quite verbose in the comment section of viral Facebook posts, and though this post has been shared over 42,000 times and counting, it has generated surprisingly little additional commentary beyond those expressing their support for the death penalty and posting crying emojis.

Death penalty for rapists.
Most of the comments under the video.

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