Daily Times

In a ghastly reminder of the kind of society women live in here in Pakistan, a mother and her 12-year-old daughter were gang-raped by three men in Ghotki, Sindh, and then burnt alive. The young girl died, but the mother miraculously survived this ordeal. A First Information Report (FIR) has been registered against the perpetrators but that is no guarantee that justice will be served. Such crimes have gone unpunished in Pakistan for too long now, overshadowing any piecemeal efforts made by law enforcement and government bodies. What is alarming is the increasing trend of following up rape with murder. We are now seeing the typical rape crime graduating into a violent gang rape and accelerating into the ultimate crime of murder. This minor girl was gang raped and intentionally set on fire.

The reason behind this willingness to commit murder by rapists now could possibly be the fact that women are gradually waking up and taking control of their own lives. There is now, more than ever before, reporting by women who have been victims of rape. Never before have we seen so many women stand up and demand justice against this barbaric act that men have been perpetuating on them for as long as memory serves in this patriarchal set up. This seems to be what frightens the men who have had it easy so far: women ready to sully their ‘honour’ and endure social stigma if it means they will be heard and their rapists brought to book. Maybe that is why murder is now the logical conclusion to the vile act of rape. Male-dominated societies like the one we have in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan are regular scenes of the crime of rape. Here the conflict between tribal culture (particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan), which thrives on patriarchy, and modern urban culture, which has brought women into the workplace, making them economic agents, is exacerbating over time. The mother and daughter from Ghotki stitched and sold rillis (traditional Sindhi quilts) for a living, exposing them to the public space. The complex layers of patriarchal society, in which modernism and tribal structures are deeply intertwined and in conflict, makes it difficult for men who have benefited from patriarchal tradition for so long to reconcile with the changing social scape, to reconcile with the fact that women are now willing to brave ‘dishonour’ and scandal to bring rapists to justice. When women are ready to go to such lengths to change the culture of society, is it not time the authorities also made concrete efforts to do the same by bringing such criminals to justice? *