Crime of being woman

Pakistan is shaken, devastated and enraged. A mother, gang-raped at gunpoint in front of her children after her car ran out of fuel on the motorway near Lahore. In a country where women are dug up from graves to be raped, the CCPO Lahore questions the victim’s choice of travelling without a male counterpart on the motorway. Insanity. This is utterly unacceptable.

The state is expected to provide protection to all its citizens and ensure non-discriminatory implementation of the Constitution. On the fateful night, it failed to protect a citizen’s basic fundamental rights enshrined therein. Period. There shouldn’t be ifs and buts to dilute the situation. The intensity of this tragedy is aggravated by the CCPO’s statement to the media where his first reaction to this horrific and unacceptable failure of the state was to blame and shame the survivor. How dare he question her choice to exercise her absolute right of freedom of movement given to her through Article 15 of the Constitution! It is his failure to ensure her safety. The blatant misogynistic attempt to create a smokescreen over his failures by diverting the conversation towards what the survivor did is appalling but too familiar.

The CCPO’s mindset has unveiled the current deplorable condition of our law enforcement agencies which resort to blaming the survivor. It has essentially created a shameless narrative of ‘warning the women’ of our society that the state cannot protect them or its children and that their protection depends on them and their behaviours. The CCPO’s message for the future was to learn from this survivor because the state agencies’ representatives are incapable of upholding the writ of the state or accepting their colossal failure.

Pakistan, according to the Global Gender Gap Report, is the world’s third worst country to be a woman in, ahead of only Iraq and Yemen. This humiliating position is earned precisely due to rape, domestic violence, killing women to uphold the fragile male egos and incidents of harassment. In a state where your gender is your crime, you inherit a very heavy baggage to fight serious battles to get what men get as their right, as it should be.

While the way the ill-fated night has changed the future of this unfortunate family cannot be imagined, it has spread a shockwave across the nation, especially for the 48.9% women and children. Every now and then, the little confidence they build over the years that public space is as much their as it is for men, shatters into a million pieces overnight through regular horrific incidents like these.

The Human Rights Watch reported that a woman is raped every two hours in Pakistan. The country has 2,937 rape cases filed in 2018 and 3,500 cases of rape and sexual abuse reported in 2019. We have to be mindful of the fact that these are just the reported number of cases which is negligible compared to the actual number of rapes which go unreported and these women suffer in silence.

Victim blaming and shaming cannot be taken lightly. It should stop. I recommend this should be criminalised and made punishable by law, especially when made by public servants. With the CCPO making these statements, the future victims will not just hesitate to report such cases to law enforcement agencies but also their own families. Rape is never the victim’s fault but is the failure of the system that provides shameful excuses for the perpetrators’ actions.

This is a wake-up call for us — as a society, as public servants and as citizens of this country overall. It is a battle of mindsets and behaviour change long before any technical solutions can be put in place.

Published in The Express Tribune, Septe0mber 13^th, 2020.

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