LHC’s TFT ruling
The unscientific and archaic ‘two-finger’ test to determine truth in a woman’s claim of being raped has been declared illegal and unconstitutional by the Lahore High Court. Women’s rights activists, academics, journalists and lawyers had long been advocating — through legal petitions as well — that this unethical hymen test to determine virginity in women is unreliable and unnecessary, and has no scientific basis. Finally, in a significant 30-page ruling yesterday, Justice Ayesha A Malik declared that “the virginity test offends the personal dignity of the female victim and therefore is against the right to life and right to dignity enshrined in Articles 9 and 14 of the Constitution”.
Despite vociferous calls from within the country and outside and despite having no forensic value, the intrusive and demeaning practice had hitherto continued in Pakistan. Imagine the plight of a woman who braves out to seek justice over her physical inability to stop the monster of a male from destroying her sense of everything by committing a rape on her. While such a woman has already had her personal sense of dignity destroyed, she — in the process of proving her weakness to the opposite gender — has had to allow her self-respect to be ruptured further.
With the legislation part taken care of, there is need now to ensure implementation — as also insisted in the court ruling. “The federation and provincial governments [need] to take necessary steps to ensure that virginity tests are not carried out in medico legal examination of the victims of rape and sexual abuse,” says the LHC judgment. It is therefore time for the authorities to coordinate with concerned professionals to devise appropriate medico-legal protocols in line with international practices for examining the victims of sexual violence with all the care and sensitivity. It is also time to amend laws that make it difficult for women to report abuse or any other crime against them.
It is, in fact, time to make our country a female-friendly abode by systematically doing away with the social edifice built on patriarchal superiority. Let’s not forget that Pakistan is world’s third worst place for women to be.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 6th, 2021.
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