Daily Times

On Friday, September 13, 2013, a girl was thrown outside the Ganga Ram Hospital, Lahore, bleeding, unconscious. The diagnosis of the maimed body revealed her to be the victim of multiple rape. The girl, with her body of a baby, in a pretty, bloodstained frock, had signs of brutalisation, as her wounds bled profusely and her organs failed to perform. Many stitching-up-of-wounds later, her body seemed unresponsive to treatment. Grown men had raped a girl, almost a baby. Lahore and the rest of Pakistan went into a state of deep grief and outrage. The victim, the little girl, was five years old.

For her and all like her, what is the word to describe what happened to them? Brutal, barbaric, animal, beastly, inhuman, monstrous? The words are superfluous, revealing human insufficiency to imagine the pain the little girl lived through. Ergo, no amount of adjectifying would do here.

Four days later, on September 17, in Lahore, another little girl was raped. The perpetrator was a 25-year-old junkie brick-maker. He found a plaything in the form of a child playing outside her house, and raped her in a nearby field. A few minutes later, he was done with her and she almost died. The victim, the little girl, was six years old.

On August 29, in Karachi, Waheed was arrested for the kidnapping and rape of a pre-teen girl, his sister-in-law — the baby sister of his wife. The victim was 12 years old.

On August 15, in Bahawalpur, another child was raped. In Chak 4/BC, the assaulter was her relative Waseem, the venue of the rape was the fields near her house, and the assault would have continued if she had not been ‘saved’ by her incessant screams and the rapist not fleeing the ‘scene’. The victim, the little girl, was eight years old.

On July 10, in Hafizabad, a girl was kidnapped by four men from her village Wachoke Kalan, en route to her field, and raped in a dera (outhouse), by nine men. The victim of the gang rape, the young girl, was 15 years old.

On July 10, in Sialkot, a girl was found dead, killed by some sharp-edged device. It was later found that the girl, of a gypsy tribe, had been raped…and then slashed to death by a man named Shahid. This victim, this very little girl, was three years old.

On June 28, in the 43/4L village of Okara, a man called Falaksher, just passing through the village, saw a girl playing. He lured her to a field and forced himself on her. The victim, the little girl, was eight years old.

On June 27, in a village of Sargodha, a rape suspect was fatally hurt by a group of men who, taking justice in their own hands, set him on fire. Abbas had raped a girl, almost a toddler. The victim, the baby, was two years old.

On May 29, in Bahawalpur, there was the abduction-rape of a labourer’s daughter by a man named Shahzad. The child almost died and the man lived to be interrogated. The victim, the little girl, was six years old.

On May17, in Chak 87/9L of Sahiwal, a retired soldier, Allahbakhsh, raped a girl. Lured into his shop, doors shut, he unleashed himself on her and when he was done with her she was close to death. The victim, the little girl, was a class two student.

On April 19, on the Lahore High Court’s directive, an investigation was initiated for the rape of a schoolteacher’s daughter from Sheikupura. The victim of the unknown rapist/s, the little girl, was seven years old.

On April 4, in Hafizabad’s Dhunni village, a gang of men comprising of Shafique, Abbas, Ishaq and Issa, the scions of ‘influential’ families, kidnapped a girl and subjected her to gang-rape. The victim, the young girl, was 13 years old.

On April 4, in Mangu Taru, Nankana Sahib, one more girl was raped by one more passerby through the village. Zahid raped the girl and by the time he was done with her, she was so battered the doctors at the DHQ hospital termed her state ‘critical’. The victim, the little girl, was a student of class two.

In March, in Shahdara, a man named Khalid took a girl to a cemetery and raped her among quiet graves and overgrown weeds. The victim, the very little girl, was four years old.

On March 14, in Okara, one more girl from a poor family was abducted. And then she was raped. The victim, the young girl, was 12 years old.

In March, in Lalupur, a girl was kidnapped by Shahid, Nadeem, Shahzad, and their abettor none other than their sister, Rubina, a woman who apparently had no qualms about seeing the girl in her brothers’ captivity to do as they wished with her. The girl was raped, locked in a dingy room, for not one or two but many days, and when her body became too beaten-down, they along with their very obliging sister, threw the girl outside her house. The victim, the young girl, was 13 years old.

On February 13, in Barakahu, Islamabad, a girl disappeared as she went for after-school tuition. The tutor, Zara, was not some sleazy character but a young woman studying Mass Communications, whose perversion was to ‘assist’ her boyfriend, Ibrar, to rape young girls as a ‘cure’ for some disease. The man in the ‘devoted’ couple had raped, murdered and buried another female earlier. The latest victim was raped, killed, and then her mutilated body was burned and thrown into a sewerage nullah. The victim, the young girl, was 11 years old.

On February 28 in Sikandar Goth, Karachi, as an attempt to rape a young boy was underway by a man, Ehsan, the police got there in time and saved the boy. But the girl who had not been saved, an earlier victim, was raped and, as if that was not enough, strangled to death. The victim, the little girl, was six years old.

In February, in Sheikhupura, a girl, comatose, lay in a battle for her life. This was another case of abduction-rape-and-tossed-in-a-field-to-die. The victim, the little girl, was seven years old.

On January 17, in Mirpurkhas, the raped-murdered body of a girl was found. Shoved into a plastic bag, she had been strangled with a thin plastic strip. The victim, the little girl, was nine years old.

All this happened in 2013.

These were the cases that made it to the press. These are just a few of the thousands that occurred. The number of reported cases in 2011 was 2,303, which despite media coverage and registered-FIRs, rose to 2,788 in 2012. The principal victims, as per the data, are females, and the age group most vulnerable to sexual abuse is 11-15. Both boys and girls form the bulk of the victims of sexual abuse. Serial offenders are rampant as the 5,689 reported abusers were named in 3,000 cases. Almost 50 percent rapists turn out to be people known to the victim’s family.

When a little girl — two or five or six years — is raped, the entire edifice of humanity is shaken. There are no explanations, no justifications, no pretexts. The skinny, scrawny, unformed body of a little girl elicits no sexual lust in any normal male. The tiny arms, legs and face of a little girl –fragile — are not to be tied, twisted, tortured. Who is to be blamed? Is it the patriarchal system where females are third-class citizens for most? Is it the violence-prone male gender — an overwhelming majority — who mistreat their mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, and eventually little girls of other people? Is it the bigoted mindset, conditioned to keep females in ‘chains’, which despises all who are seen in public, notwithstanding their age or shape? Is it the apathetic attitude of taking no as assent and the screams of a tiny, terrified girl to be sounds to whet the appetite for sexual gratification? Is it the belief that the forced ‘intimacy’ with anyone, be it your wife, a young cousin or the daughter of a friend, is no big deal? Is it the misplaced confidence of the molestation of a female, even killing, of not garnering much significance beyond a few voices on TV, Twitter and Facebook? Is it the lawlessness that renders accountability to be as rare as the safety of an unaccompanied little girl playing on the street outside her own house? Is it the absence of sanctity of all values marking mere mortals as human beings?

The rape of a little girl is not a sexual act by any stretch of any warped imagination. The rape of a little girl is simply a reiteration of the darkest desires of some who ‘celebrate’ their ‘impotent’ manhood by forcing themselves on helpless, delicate, tiny beings who are to be loved and protected. The rape of a little girl is merely a manifestation of the absolute tattering of the fibre of a social order that with a push or two more will catapult into an abyss of absolute criminality with nothing to mark it with any human connotation. The rape of a little girl is that unimaginable act the perpetrators of which, in my view, cannot even be classified as mere criminals. With no line of defence, whatsoever.

I do not presume to even imagine what the five-year-old raped on Friday, September 13, went through. And those before and after her. The brutalisation of her body, mind and heart defy the power of my words to make any sense of. I do not wish to quantify her pain and I am no one to gauge the extent of the breaking of her body. As a human being, as a woman, as a mother, all I do is clasp my hands, and send her my prayers, my love and my sense of shame for how little I can do for her.

May God bless her and all the others, named and unknown…and may they their broken smiles be whole again…Soon…Amen.

The writer is an Assistant Editor at Daily Times. She tweets at @MehrTarar and can be reached at mehrt2000@gmail.com