On February 20, a girl was was abducted from Islamabad’s F-11 markaz and gang-raped at gunpoint. A case was registered in Shalimar police station against two persons who raped her when she sought their help to get a job.
This was only weeks after the horrific F-9 park rape incident which made headlines at the beginning of the month. During the same week as the F-9 incident, an 18-year old bus hostess was raped by a guard, in a moving bus, on gunpoint.
It is unfortunate that despite all the outrage we see on the mainstream and social media, the increase in reported cases of rape indicates that there is no safe space for women in Pakistan. Reported rape cases are just the tip of the iceberg, yet they serve as reminders that our society is one that perpetuates a culture that fosters rapists with impunity.
In the past year, 513 women were raped in the metropolis of Karachi alone. In the month of May last year, a woman was gang-raped on a train heading to Karachi from Multan. In July, a foreign TikToker was gang-raped in a hotel in Fort Munro, Dera Ghazi Khan.
We must pause and think: what is it that we have been doing so wrong as a society that men feel entitled to rape and then get away with it? Almost everything.
On several occasions, men in positions of power have publicly passed comments that reveal the culture of victim-shaming that is rampant in Pakistan. It shouldn’t be surprising to deduce that rape culture is prevalent in a country where a prime minister had just last year remarked, “If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the man unless they are robots. It’s common sense.”
Or where nearly two decades ago, a former president talking about Mukhtaran Mai’s gang rape in 2002, said in an interview to an international newspaper: “A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.” No surprise that in a country where male figures of authority can display such apathy openly, victim-blaming is a norm.
In another high-profile rape case, the remarks of senior police official Umer Sheikh, the then Lahore Capital City Police officer, said on national television that the victim of the motorway gang-rape incident, the woman was to be partly blamed. Why had she not taken a busier road, he questioned. Why had she not checked her fuel before departing and why had she travelled under the impression that Pakistan is as safe as “France”, of which the woman was a dual citizen. Although after massive protests, he went on to apologize but his remarks exemplify the widespread problem within our society that places the onus of rape on the victim.
“Why did she go out? What was she wearing? Who was she with? What time did she go?”—these are the questions asked when a rape case makes headlines. We fail to ask instead the right question: “Why did the rapist feel immune to commit such a heinous crime?”
If not for victim-blaming, the discussion is around “how not to get raped”— keep a sharp tool, a knife or a pepper spray, learn self-defence, dress modestly, don’t go out at night. However, while trying to come up with a faulty instruction manual on how to not get raped, the society forgets to teach men “not to rape”. This training requires no more than to learn the simple idea of consent and to accept women as equal members of society.
According to a 2017 report from Madadgaar National Helpline 1098, nearly 93% of women in Pakistan have experienced some form of sexual violence in public places in their lifetime. As a society, we raise our girls by telling them they must navigate their way through a male-dominated world by shrinking their existence and becoming next to invisible. No responsibility is placed on men because it’s said that “boys will be boys” and so they are let off the hook.
By the time we are adult women, fear is internalised and consequently survival mode is our automatic mode when we are in public. Yet there is no blueprint that helps us live unscathed. For decades, societal behaviours place more responsibility and pressure on women to maintain a certain image by dictating the way that she should dress, how she should sit, the frequency of her pitch in public, so on and so forth — any conduct outside this framework is an indicator to attract male attention and “asking for it.”
In coming up with our defective guide, we forget that men rape in broad daylight, men rape at homes, men rape children, men rape transgenders, men rape their wives, men rape dead bodies—men rape anyone that they feel entitled to rape. The issue lies in entitlement and power, and we must inspect everything that we are doing wrong that enables entitled cis men to assert their power and do whatever they want to without consent.
Data collected from the Punjab Home Department and the Ministry of Human Rights shows that as many as 21,900 rape cases were reported in Pakistan from 2017-2021 — which means one woman gets raped every two hours. However, these astonishing figures are nowhere near the real data as only 10 per cent of the rape cases are reported. The conviction rates are abysmal. Only in the past year did the conviction rate in cases of sexual violence increase from three per cent to 16 per cent (2022-2023).
The few cases that are reported serve as an example of the stigmatisation that rape victims have to endure, on top of the horrendous and traumatic event they were made to suffer. Not only is there next to zero hope of getting justice but also the fear of humiliation at the hands of the society and law enforcement personnel. This stigmatization is based on institutional sexism and patriarchal culture where we attach “honour” to women’s bodies.
Rape culture in Pakistan is strengthened at every level when we normalize this idea that men simply cannot control their sexual urge and impulse in the presence of women and so the onus to safeguard themselves from getting raped lies on the women. Both the state and society have failed to ensure their safety. Women in Pakistan, especially those belonging from doubly marginalised communities, have had their existence threatened to such an extent that they feel uncomfortable in occupying the same space as other people.
It is not that we do not have laws to criminalise rape. Rape is a punishable crime as per the law of Pakistan, resulting in 25 years of jail or lifetime imprisonment. Over the years, more legislative reforms have been brought about, such as the establishment of special courts for rape trials in December 2020 and the new anti-rape law that includes chemical castration of serial rapists. However, such legislation, as is with the case of advocating capital punishment for rapists to set “examples”, deflects from the root causes of sexual violence: a misogynistic culture that treats women as mere objects of sexual desire and a normalisation of victim-blaming.
Change will come only by acknowledging that every rape case that emerges on the media is not an isolated case but an accumulative effect for every time that we brushed off misogynistic comments and actions, every time we stayed silent when someone cracked a “rape joke”, and for not teaching our kids about sexual health and consent.
The writer is a freelance journalist and can be reached at somaiyah.hafeez2000@gmail.com. All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer.