Petition (n.): A respectful or humble request.

THERE are many horrifying things in the news today.

President Bashar al Assad of Syria and his wife gossip about America's Got Talent and splurge thousands on new chandeliers while his regime targets journalists, murders civilians willy-nilly and gives Al Qaeda all the help it needs to get a foothold in the region, for one.

The thought that the actor who plays Ken Barlow not only has a winky but has used it on 1,000 women for another - a fact made 433% more awful by the revelation his nickname on set was 'Cock Roache'.

Troops getting their pay cut while serving on the front line of a pointless war, a journalist being arrested for writing about publicly-available information, SamCam being praised for wearing a selection of utterly boring frocks. It's all stuff that makes you shake your head, grit your teeth, and turn the page.

And all of those things appear pale, pointless and petty when you consider the true horror which is the story of Amina Filali, whose tale has been reported, very briefly, in just a few papers.

She came from a small town near Tangiers in Morocco and was abducted and raped at the age of 15 by a man who was 10 years her senior. I can't find his name, or I'd publish it in a large and angry font.

Morocco is considered one of the most forward-thinking Arabic countries in terms of women's rights. Ten per cent of seats in its Parliament are reserved for women, custody, inheritance and divorce laws have been modernised, and the minimum age of marriage raised from 15 to 18.

Perhaps bearing this in mind, Amina's family took her abuser to court in a civil action to demand justice.

But unfortunately Morocco also retains a law which says that if a woman under 18 is abducted, the 'stain of honour' upon her and her family can be removed if the abductor marries her. This also gives the perpetrator immunity from prosecution.

The court ordered the two to enter a marriage contract. The abuser at first refused - after all, she was used goods - but was forced to agree after being threatened with a sentence of up to 20 years in jail if he did not.

Amina and this unnamed man were married, against both their wills, five months ago. Amina was regularly beaten and, it is assumed, probably raped throughout the marriage.

Unable to bear it any more, she ate rat poison.

For those who don't know, rat poison's main constituent is usually an anti-coagulant like warfarin, which prevents the blood from clotting and the body from healing itself. tiny blood vessels all over your body break and clot every day - if you bruise or sneeze for example. Eating rat poison means that you bleed to death, internally, in great pain over several days. It's not an easy way to go.

When Amina told her abuser what she had done, he dragged her down the street by her hair in a rage. This was probably more merciful than he intended, as it will merely have speeded up the rate at which she was losing blood. In another country he would be charged with manslaughter for not calling a doctor and for hastening her death.

But then, in another country it would not have happened at all. There would be no 'stain' on the victim of a dreadful crime that needed to be removed, and the rapist would be named, shamed and jailed, at least for a while.

Amina's story is horrifying in a thousand ways but it has two main lessons which, whether you care about a girl in Morocco or not, have some impact on lives here in Britain too.

Firstly, after the first court decision that she should marry her rapist, it led to a very strong campaign on Twitter and Facebook with many thousands of people behind it, all retweeting in a frenzy that this sort of thing shouldn't be allowed. It made bugger-all difference to Amina, which just goes to show that while social media can spread the word its practical power to change the course of events is limited. Petitions are simply too polite.

And secondly, whatever you might think about strict Islamic law, it is based upon a literal reading of its holy book. If there is a God-fearing type reading this - hello, by the way, can't imagine we've much in common but you're welcome all the same - the very same provision for a rapist to marry his victim is in the Bible and the Torah. It's in Deuteronomy, Chapter 22 to be precise, shortly after bits about how women can't wear trousers and a girl who's not a virgin when she marries can be stoned to death.

The Deuteronomic Code is generally considered to be based on the speeches of Moses, who is regarded as a prophet by all three Abrahamic faiths. And their holy books are the foundations of many of the world's laws.

However, just because this was the way people carried on thousands of years ago doesn't mean it's still all right. As our societies have matured we've absorbed the bits of those books that work into our penal codes and quietly forgotten about the parts which don't. The holy books were written and re-written by human beings, and just like journalists they're capable of producing inaccurate, ambiguous or misleading copy, and telling stories which may well have been true at the time of publication but which don't stand up to later scrutiny.

So the next time someone of a religious bent says some people can't do all the things everyone else does because it says so in a book, think about what the same book says about people like Amina.

Then do what she couldn't, and flick 'em the Vs.

Or start a petition, and see how far it gets you.

A meaty, messy business.

JOURNALISTS are often accused of romanticising their profession, especially when one of our own dies.

It's true that a tendency to lyricise and the constant criticism we get means we often talk about freedom of speech and fighting for the little man and the nobler justifications of our trade.

Sometimes that's right. More often though we deal with humanity at its extremes - crime, death, birth, heartbreak, revenge - and whether you're dealing with a wronged lover, a violent criminal or the recently bereaved, journalism is a meaty, messy business which is not for the faint of spirit.

You don't get far wearing rose-tinted spectacles. And there is no higher part of my profession nor one so grisly as the work of covering a war. It is one of the most valuable and worthy things any reporter or photographer can do, the greatest risk they can take, and of course the one most likely to end badly. It is the thing most guaranteed to impress other journalists beyond measure, an extremely difficult feat among seasoned cynics.

Today Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik - both of them award winners - were killed in the Syrian city of Homs as they covered the shelling of civilians by President Bashar Assad.

The snapper working with Marie, Paul Conroy, was injured. He's probably being cared for by the very limited resources of the opposition, while Marie and Remi's bodies have yet to be recovered. Their editors are trying their best to bring them all home, while the city remains under fire.

I do not know any of the people concerned, so it's not for me to write about them. Their friends will do that I am sure. And I've never been to war, a fact which makes my mother glad and me a little wistful.

There are those who, when those obituaries are written, will say we hacks treat each other better than we do others, that we show more grace and remorse when a fellow vulture tumbles off the perch than we do to the average deaths we deal with. Perhaps that is case. But then average deaths are usually due to accident, insanity or circumstance - when a hack dies in harness it's usually because they chose to take that risk.

At a memorial service at the journalists' church St Brides last year ITV news anchor Mark Austin said people often do not understand why we run towards danger rather than away from it. Usually it's for those higher goals, and sometimes if we've done it too often it's because we've become addicted to it, as we become attached to so many things in this job - the stories, the gossip, the black humour, the free drinks.

Because, you see, there are two sides to a journalist's brain. On the one hand there is a human part, the bit which knows your mum worries, that this job is bizarre, the side of you which is moved to tears when someone tells you a heart-rending tale. A good journalist never, ever loses that side to them because it is what makes them good, it gives them empathy and understanding.

On the other hand is the news gatherer, the bit of your head which is occupied with getting the right turn of phrase, capturing an image, and getting a copy of the receipt. The bit which fires up, when you are stood amid a sea of dead and rotting corpses and the human side of your head wants to vomit itself inside out and get on the first plane home, and tells you 'this is BRILLIANT'.

While I've never been to war, I've been to that place. I've sat amid carnage and wondered why I can't cry at the same time as scribbling notes and thinking 'this is writing like melted butter, it's going to sail onto the front'. When I was 18 and on my first local paper I came in to work one day to see my chief reporter crash the phone back on the hook and say to me excitedly: "There's been a murder on your patch!" And my response was: "GREAT!"

That's when you know you're a hack - when you run towards the bad things. Since then I've put myself in places where I was far from safe, where the mere fact of my presence meant my mum didn't sleep for a week or I've decided not to tell her I was there until I wasn't any more. I've stood and watched things I can't fix but tear my heart apart to see, and I've come home with a thousand-yard stare to my boss telling me to take some time off and put my head back together.

I have friends who have died and been injured. I have mates who quite literally skip when told they're going to Afghanistan. And half of me is envious of them, while the other half thinks they're nuts. Everyone else in a war gets a gun, and all we have is a pen or a camera. And half the time I can never find my pen.

Maybe we're just screw-ups, and this job keeps us out of the asylum and safely medicated in the pub. I've been on jobs that were horrendous by day and every evening, once our copy was filed, the press pack tore the town up and drank every bar in the place dry. In those circumstances the hangover actually makes you feel a bit better.

But the end result, whatever our motivation or however much of our brains is given over to trying to get a sexy byline shot or the front page, is that someone sees the things no-one else wants to. Maybe it means knocking on a rapist's door late at night, finding the right words to describe an unspeakable thing, or sneaking into a city under siege from the forces of a dictator to tell the world what's happening.

We bear witness, however unbearable we find it ourselves, and there's not a single journo dead or alive who will tell you that's not worth doing, and that usually it's as far from romantic or rose-tinted as you can get.

So while I didn't know them, I'll raise a glass to Marie and Remi tonight - and take my hat off to two brave people who didn't have to do what they did, but thought someone ought to do it anyway.