What is worse than being raped? For a woman, other than death, nothing else. And what is worse than a rape is being gang raped at gunpoint. The agony does not stop there. The very act is a mutilation of one’s body, soul, mind, and self-respect. It is a perversion of what is one’s most personal possession: one’s body. What is termed as a proof of misplaced masculinity strips a woman of her femininity, leaving her to an internal suffering for a long time, sometimes forever. The assault inculcates in her a shaky faith in everything that follows. Not just in a rigid, narrow-minded society like ours, but even in the most advanced of countries, women go through this hell and a lot of time, decide to stay mum. What follows opens a different doorway to a different kind of hell. In our country, it is as bad as it gets. The patriarchal culture does not even consider it a crime; women just like to make stories up and it is redundant to take them seriously even if the ‘misdemeanour’ perpetrated against them is as serious as gang rape. The FIR is the first hurdle. The entire process of proving a rape case in court is so obfuscated that even the conscientious — a rare but still extant entity — police officer hesitates in registering it. Mostly, police exhibit disdain and indifference to the complainants. Once, albeit with difficulty, the case is registered, the apprehending of the accused becomes the next issue. Since a rape is not, in a number of cases, a visibly violent act, the police deeming the verbal complaint insignificant take ages to round up the accused. During investigation, the victim becomes the fallen woman, while the accused either stick to a firm refusal to accept their crime or make it sound like a consensual act. If by luck, the case reaches a court, the victim encounters a barrage of insults and accusations; the defence, to prove its client innocent, starts a smear game of degradation, forcing the victim to relive her earlier ordeal. The worst are the cases where the accused are from any organisation whose members wear a uniform: the police and armed forces. What should be tagged as an individual act or a crime by a few takes on the hue of tarnishing the entire body of that institution. The victims be damned, let there be no stain on the integrity of those who wear a uniform and protect the nation. The doctrine of unity of such institutions prevents individuals from stepping up and taking responsibility. The sanctity of the uniform remains intact while the abused woman is stripped of her tattered honour. The latest reported rape case has turned into an even bigger drama than most. In Fort Munro in the Dera Ghazi Khan district, five girls on a sightseeing trip with a male companion were allegedly gang raped by a group of border military police personnel. On the pretext of routine checking, five men raped them at a check post, three of whom, after the girls’ identification, have been apprehended. Despite their repeated refusal to own up, the investigation continues. The entire personnel of the police post have been suspended, which could have been because of the intervention of the armed tribes of the area who surrounded and confined the accused inside the police station, curbing their transfer to DG Khan for further investigation. The armed tribals, though nobly intentioned, have started their own process of justice; after locking the accused up, a dialogue with the police has been initiated, making the border military police a joke and the tribal people all set to invoke a jirga-processed verdict. While the DNA samples of the girls have been sent to Lahore, the power struggle between a tribal jirga and police have highlighted the intrinsic flaws of an archaic system that has its vision of right and wrong blurred. While the girls are scrutinised, questioned and doubted, the police and the tribal jirga have made it their own personal conflict, thus delaying a due process of justice that in any case needs a complete overhaul. *