No sooner had the perpetrators of Delhi’s notorious gang rape been sentenced to death, a plethora of reports on rape have surfaced one after the other in Pakistan. One cannot easily dismiss these reports; one of them concerns a child of no more than five years, gang-raped by five men and dumped outside a hospital in Lahore last Friday. She was so brutally molested that she required a series of surgeries to get her through the ordeal. The nation was still shocked at this news when it received wind of another rape of a minor, this time in Faisalabad, also gang-raped by five men. One is still processing this heinous information when it is being learnt that yet another minor girl, this time just six-years-old, was raped by a labourer in Lahore just one day ago. Sadly, there is no end to such reports. We hear about instances of rape and sexual abuse taking place in our country every day, we hear of young boys being sodomised and children being made victims of incest but we have never done anything about it. Like all issues that embarrass us, we sweep it under the rug, hoping that it will go away.
However, as these latest reports suggest, rapes and incidence of sexual crime, particularly against children, are on the rise in Pakistan. The Delhi rape case certainly caused certain elements in our society to look at India and feel a kind of ‘triumphant illusion’ in which we thought we were above that kind of behaviour. Pakistan is a mirror image of India in this regard, with the rapes that are reported being only the tip of the iceberg. Rape is a stigma and one of the reasons for this is the media. As we have seen in the case of Lahore’s five-year-old rape victim, the media has been showing pictures of her and releasing her name. Where are the ethics that require the media not to disclose a rape victim’s identity? This kind of unleashed media is part of the problem. Rape is a crime that leaves lifelong scars and the victim should not have to deal with public scrutiny. The police, in many instances, coerce the victim into dropping the case or use the opportunity to take bribes. We, as a society, have done precious little to curb the many rapes that occur inside people’s homes and in their neighbourhoods, usually carried out by people who are closest to the victim. Many child pornography websites can be accessed in Pakistan but YouTube is still banned. Does that not speak volumes about our priorities? It is time our attitude towards rape changes and victims are dealt with sensitivity and care. Rape is the biggest social crime and we seem to have looked the other way at the rot that is growing from the inside. How many more of our little sons, daughters and women will have to become another statistic in this gruesome cultural ‘tradition’? *