Daily Times

Another woman was raped, this time by a revenue official in Toba Tek Singh who took her to a revenue office under false pretences while his accomplice stood guard. No woman is spared in Pakistan, not even the dead, evidenced by the rise in necrophilia where men literally dig women out of their graves just so they can rape them. Ranking 145th out of 146 on the gender equality index, life for women in Pakistan is delineated in a culture of violence that blames victims and offers unconditional immunity to men.

This is the same country where a senior police official took to national TV to blame a woman raped on the motorway in front of her kids-it is one thing to experience something as traumatic as rape but another altogether for law enforcement to imply that the victim is somehow responsible for their safety in a country where women are made to feel unsafe at every possible juncture. Violence against women has become so institutionalised and routine that we don’t even question it anymore. The terminology used to discuss rape is perhaps the biggest problem. Rape is often portrayed as a loss of piety, corrupting an otherwise chaste woman as opposed to the insidious violation that it is.

In the event that a rape case wriggles its way into the news cycle, our police extrajudicially kill the perpetrators as opposed to taking them to trial. In December 2020, Pakistan strengthened its rape laws, creating special courts to try cases within four months and provide medical examinations to women within six hours of a complaint being made. But very little has changed on the ground.

Let’s not forget that this is a law that proposes chemical castration as a punishment for repeated rape offenders, violating our constitutional obligations to prohibit torture and also doing very little to remedy the flawed criminal justice system that leads to low convictions for rapists. Misogyny, the real culprit, is so deeply rooted in our collective conscience that no amount of harsh sentencing can prevent gendered violence until we think critically about why it happens with such frequency in the first place. *