We need the Aurat March

In 1978, film director Roman Polanski fled the United States while awaiting being sentenced for the rape of a minor. Last Friday, he was awarded France’s equivalent of an Academy Award.

“Distinguishing Polanski is spitting on the face of all victims,” said Adèle Haenel, a prominent French actress. “It means raping women isn’t bad.”

Polanski’s latest film is about the Dreyfus affair, an infamous instance of the miscarriage of justice. Irony hung its head in shame, tied itself to a concrete block, and jumped into the Seine.

Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl. Yet, he was still able to escape punishment and be lauded for his work. His case is one of countless others that show the difficulty women around the world face in bringing powerful men to justice. While Harvey Weinstein’s conviction may be a watershed moment for the global #MeToo movement, there is still a long way to go in the pursuit of a more equal world. After all, it took decades of advocacy to bring a known predator like Weinstein to trial. A man accused of rape and harassment by more than 90 women could have gotten away with it had it not been for the superhuman tenacity shown by the victims of his predation.

And that is essentially what the global #MeToo movement is all about: you should not need to have superhuman qualities to obtain justice.

Pakistan’s Aurat March is an extension of the global movement — but it is also much more. It forces the privileged lot of this country to confront the bitter truth that many of the gains made by global feminist movements across the world have not been translated into reality in this country. The Aurat March wants to show us the ugly, hushed-up, underbelly of a country where women are abused, discriminated, harassed, and raped without any realistic avenues of justice available to them. Where inequality in employment is rampant, the justice system has been built without respecting their perspective, and a woman’s social mobility is hindered in the name of a morality crafted over centuries by men.

This is why women are marching on the 8^th of this month. It is why we must leave our positions of privilege and join them.

Women are marching on the 8^th because the numbers don’t lie. Pakistan ranks 164 out of 167 countries in the 2019 Women, Peace and Security Index; it ranks 113 out of 129 in the Sustainable Development Goals Index; it is 6^th on the list of countries found most dangerous for women; it has an estimated 12.2 million girls out of school; approximately 1,000 women are murdered every year in the name of “honour”; around 1,000 girls belonging to religious minorities are forcibly converted and forced to marry every year in Sindh; 21% of girls in Pakistan are married before the age of 18.

But opponents of the march, those that file petitions in courts to stop women from exercising their constitutional rights, still don’t understand the need for women to raise their voice.

They don’t understand that our criminal justice system and its evidentiary burdens are structured in a way that is alien to the experiences of women.

We still demand physical or corroborating evidence in sexual harassment cases. Even though it is a crime that almost always has neither. We still peddle the myth that harassment is done to a woman by a stranger, despite evidence to the contrary that shows most women are harassed by close family members or people they know.

The court system still does not understand that victims of sexual offences often come forward after considerable delay. Yet the law treats a delay between an incident and the lodging of a FIR as detrimental to a successful prosecution.

And the criminal justice system has routinely failed to properly address crimes that predominantly impact women. From child abuse in Kasur to forced conversions in Sindh.

Still don’t understand why women march?

They march because last year, Dua Mangi was kidnapped from the streets of Karachi and people blamed her for her suffering. They march because when Meesha Shafi accused a powerful man of sexual harassment, she was blamed for putting herself in that situation. They march because victim-blaming is so prevalent in our society that young girls hide their trauma from their own families for fear of being shamed.

Like every year, without a shadow of a doubt, opponents of the march will point to some posters as a conclusive argument against the entire concept. The Aurat March, they will say, is deteriorating the moral fabric of this country.

But a country where girls below the age of 10 are raped, where family members weep when a daughter is born, where the entire section of the nikahnama (marriage agreement) pertaining to the rights of women is crossed out, and where a woman is blamed for being sexually assaulted, is not in a healthy moral condition to begin with. Perhaps these opponents of the march should exude their energy to combat that moral decay instead of at a few harmless posters.

And perhaps opponents of the march should take stock of the fact that the morality they are so desperate to protect is one that is entrenched in patriarchy. Blissfully ignorant that these moral codes that are to be accepted without question have been crafted over centuries by men without any participation by women.

Moral codes that have allowed practices like virginity testing to become a part of our criminal justice system — regardless of it being scientifically inaccurate, regardless of it being in violation of our Constitution, and regardless of it adding to the trauma of a woman who has been raped.

Most opponents of the march suffer from perspective bias. They search for the most ostentatious posters and project the movement as being solely about that one issue. However, for every poster that opponents find objectionable — because they cannot fathom that women have to deal with receiving unsolicited pictures of male genitals — there are many others dealing with honour killings, equal pay, and the freedom to work. If only they would open their eyes and see beyond their rage.

Men should not have a problem with women saying “mera jism, meri marzi (my body, my choice)”. The fact that they do simply mean that women have been told by men what to do with their bodies for so long that it is now seen as obscene for them to want that right for themselves. When they have been devoid of autonomy over their body, why can’t they demand that autonomy back?

If all this still doesn’t convince people to support the march, well then, the question to ask is: what scares you so much about women being free?

Published in The Express Tribune, March 3^rd, 2020.

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