Daily Times

A security guard working with a private security company was sentenced to life for raping a foreign national attached to a United Nations subsidiary. While the decision is certainly a welcome development, most rape cases in Pakistan do not end with convictions and certainly not with a life-imprisonment sentence. In fact, it isn’t too far-fetched to assume that the rapist in question was only convicted because his victim was a foreign national. While rape cases are being reported more and more these days, some even wriggling their way into the national news cycle, rates of trial and conviction remain abysmally low.

Rape is categorised as a non-compoundable offence under Pakistani law, but its prevalence suggests that many do not treat it as such. There are no safe spaces for women in a country where one can be raped at gunpoint in a large public park regularly frequented by families and children or on the motorway in front of your kids. While rape laws have been reformed over the last two decades, misogynistic attitudes run rampant in law enforcement, investigators and judicial officials who use archaic notions of morality to assess the veracity of rape accusations. Influential people are altogether exempt from the law and often force their victims to reach pre-trial settlements.

It was only recently that a sessions judge in Karachi ruled that out-of-court settlements would be inadmissible in rape cases-a landmark judgement that must form the core of judicial rape proceedings in Pakistan. A guilty defendant can use pretrial settlements to manipulate or outright coerce the complainant to not cooperate with the prosecution. A rape victim may desire justice, but, ultimately, may accept the offer of payment to avoid the additional trauma of continuing the investigation, especially in Pakistan where a woman’s word matters less than a man’s. Perhaps most troubling is that settlements perpetuate low rates of conviction and contribute to the myth that rape is not common and rape victims are not credible. It is the court’s responsibility to make sure this doesn’t happen, and to protect rape victims when they cannot speak for themselves. The laws already exist and therefore, the onus lies on their iron-clad implementation. *