I can understand being too terrified to intervene. I would not attempt to justify my fear by stating: “Oh, well, that’s just what they do here.”

This is not Star Trek. There is no Prime Directive.

There is nothing written anywhere that states we have to allow harm to come to others because of where those people live. If there was, you wouldn’t see all the campaigns that attempt to stop people from being stoned to death. You wouldn’t see people stepping in to try and put an end to the brutality happening in Somalia.

There are no cultural “consequences” to preventing a rape, except that you’re helping a girl/woman (generally) NOT become an outcast. If anything, you’re performing a cultural service by ensuring her safety. In most of those societies, the stigma on rape victims far exceeds what we see in the U.S., and by preventing the rape, you’re making sure the girl/woman still has a future in her village.

Things like this infuriate me. People need to stop making excuses for passively standing by and allowing horrible things to happen to people who don’t deserve them. Think of those two gang rapes that happened outside of high school dances. Boys were standing around LAUGHING at the girls (who were screaming for help) – and some of the boys even joined in – and it’s all on video. And that happened in the United States, not the back corners of the world where there’s no law enforcement. By this anthropologist’s argument, we should shrug that off as “something that just happens in this society” because the boys were treating it as a normal and fun act.

F**K THAT.

Superstition, violence, hatred – these things are not culture, and it does more harm to allow them to continue than it does to remain hands-off for fear of bullying.

But in this situation, the girl is clearly unwilling and she has the support of other members of her tribe. this is not some sort of consensual barbarity, but is an action that violates what is expected as civil conduct of those people. They were fighting over her! It wasn’t like they showed up and the girl, resigned, willingly went with them because, although she didn’t like it, it was what was expected. No, she was fighting.

Whoever wrote that (or something similar) misread the situation. What was happening wasn’t ‘normal’. Common, perhaps, but not socially acceptable.

Besides which harming other people against their will is as close to a moral universal that we’ll ever have.

As a related story:
I don’t know how familiar you are with the author Stig Larrson. The original title of his “Girl with the dragon tatoo” books is “Men who hate women”.
His writings have a biographical background. When he was a teenager he witnessed some older boys raping a girl. He could have done something, he didn’t do anything and this experience shaped him, he became a vocal feminist. And years later he met that woman again, and he said he was sorry and he really had changed and could she ever fogive him and she told him that, no shit, she would never forgive him, because he had the chance to help her and he didn’t help her and no matter how much good he did in his life, it would never make amends for what he’d done to her.

What makes rape such an “acceptable” crime that people will look away?