Self-inflicted wounds

There is an urgent need to reform the entire police investigation process

A teenaged girl in Thar has killed herself after being harassed and blackmailed by her alleged rapists, who roam free out on bail. Legally, the police will write this up as a suicide, but by all intents and purposes, they have played their part in a murder. The victim, a Hindu girl, belongs to the village Dalan-Jo-Tarr near Chelhar village of Thar in Sindh province. The girl had been gang-raped by three men in July last year. They took turns at the poor girl and even filmed the entire ordeal. But being influential, they not only managed to secure bail but also threatened and harassed the victim and her family to keep them from taking the case to the court.

The limitations of the police, especially before influential personalities, is well known. The attitude of the police towards rape victims – even if the example is an extreme one – has come to light in the form of the CCPO Lahore. He has been unrelenting in his viewing of the September 9 motorway gang-rape case where a woman stranded on the side of the road late at night because her car broke down was raped in front of her minor children. Appearing before a Senate committee, the CCPO again blamed the victim for leaving the house and travelling without taking permission from her husband.

To make matters worse, officers from another part of the country before another parliamentary committee disclosed another set of startling facts. Telling a special committee on the protection of children, the district police officer in Nowshera told senators that in the rest of the world, the police – while responding to rape incidents – first collect evidence and then charge-sheet suspects, based on victim statements, witness testimony and available evidence. In Pakistan, things do not happen this way. Here, they first nominate and charge-sheet a suspect and then collect evidence. Ostensibly, by then, the evidence has been lost or destroyed making convictions very hard.

As much as there is a need for introspection to address root causes of rapes, there is a far urgent need to reform the entire police investigation process.