Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, has come under fire once again for statements blaming women’s dressing for the country’s escalating sexual violence.
In an interview with ‘Axios on HBO’, the Pakistan PM said: “If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the men, unless they are robots. It’s just common sense.”
Defending his earlier remarks, Khan added, “…I said the concept of ‘purdah’ avoids temptation in society. We don’t have discos here, we don’t have nightclubs. It is a completely different society and way of life here. So if you raise temptation in society to a point — all these young guys have nowhere to go — it has a consequence in the society.”
The prime minister’s statement did not just cause uproar on social media amongst journalists and females but shockingly, saw an immediate upward trend in rape cases the same day after the interview got published. Amongst others, a young girl was raped in Punjab by three men who allegedly, sexually assaulted the 15-year-old and filmed her in Toba Tek Singh.
It is pertinent here to mention that there are at least 11 rape cases reported in Pakistan every day with over 22,000 cases reported to police across the country in the last six years, according to official statistics.
Therefore, the impact of Khan’s misogynistic comment regarding the sensitive topic would not only expand the degree of autonomy it is already granted in our closed society but would, once again, promote the typical patriarchal system where the male gender ‘gets what he wants’ either by will or by force.
The underlying question is; is it common sense? Is the male gender so weak and out of control that merely a woman’s dress code would prompt him to break all moral barriers and resort to sexual violence?
There are a few factors to prove that rape is definitely not the fault of the victim or his or her clothing but of the rapist.
According to the infamous Freudian psychoanalytic theory, there are three aspects of an individual’s mind.
The id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories, the super-ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. Therefore, any man who chooses to act on his instincts consciously ignores the plea of his ego not to break the boundaries of morality and it is not because of the clothing on another human being.
Similarly, if we compare the society of the west, the environment is more conducive to the act of raping as the open use of drugs and harmful substances make women more easy targets for sexual violence, thereby inferring that intoxication could play a role. More than 200 crimes of a violent or sexual nature were reported in Oxford in just one month this year, according to the data for January 2021.
However, the relationship between an individual committing a heinous crime in his senses is not directly proportional to the clothing of the victim.
Rape culture in Pakistan is systemic. It is reinforced at every level; from blaming women for ‘getting themselves raped’ to never really expecting men not to rape women. The statement made by the premier is just like bait for all those harassers who cannot control their urges.
The most important point and irony that carves itself against this ideology is that Pakistan reports rape cases against not only women who are fully covered from head to toe, but underage girls and boys!
The recent Mufti Azizur Rehman case as well as the motorway case where the victim, a resident of Lahore’s Defence Housing Society, was stuck on the motorway with her two children at around 1am after her car ran out of petrol is evidence enough of the triggering aspects of rape.
Omer Aftab, CEO at White Ribbon Pakistan, suggests that there are three main causes of rape in Pakistan – lack of education, sexual frustration and, lastly, the poor implementation of the law.
“Men who lack basic education think women can be treated as chattels and exploit them sexually for their own gains.”
To sum it up, reasons to rape are not related to a female’s clothing. Men who can control their sexual instincts are not robots. Neutralizing the concept of accepting a woman for her clothing has not, yet, been done in Pakistan despite years of claimed progress and modernity.
Those who have been raped in our society despite not wearing revealing clothes would not only feel alienated today but would lose hope in the system that the prime minister is endorsing.
Women are groped in societies which have “discos and nightclubs” as well as women who wear an abaya and a hijab. Putting the burden of someone else’s actions on their dressing is the height of injustice!