Outlandish cures in a man’s world

There is a strong, albeit baseless belief in developing countries that virgin women are the cure to HIV/AIDS.

Around two weeks back, a pre-teen girl went missing from Bhara Kahu. Her parents told the police that her tutor kidnapped her. Unfortunately, the police were not particularly interested in investigating. Days later, the burnt body of a little girl was found in I-9. Forensics on the body showed that the missing 11-year-old was no longer missing.

Missing person case solved, rape-murder case opened.

The ensuing murder investigation saw the tutor and her ‘boyfriend’ picked up by the police. They quickly confessed to the crime.

Cased closed?

Not at all.

This is where the case details started turning into a bad movie script. During interrogations, the police learnt that the man claimed to have AIDS. Blood tests haven’t confirmed whether or not this was just a strange ruse or if he really has the disease. However, he did admit to killing two (grown) women before the eleven-year-old, because he thought it would cure his AIDS.

HIV/AIDS is incurable. Decades of research have only yielded antiretroviral treatments which can prolong an infected person’s life while reducing the number of attached problems.

However, there is a strong, albeit baseless belief in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing countries — of which Pakistan is apparently one — that virgin women are the cure to the disease.

The murderer, after finding that his two adult victims were unable to cure his AIDS, he went for a younger victim.

Apart from not curing the infected person, such contact exposes the uninfected individual to HIV, and further spreads the disease. The belief is responsible for a worrying number of rape, sexual abuse and child molestation cases. Yet, while African governments are at least willing to try to educate their people on the issue, our state is unwilling to admit that ‘intimacy’ can exist in a relationship between unmarried couples. Add to that the misogyny in society, and new problems rise up.

I recently came across a flyer for an invasive feminine product targeted at improving the love life of new parents. While the product had some minor health and other benefits for the woman using it, the flyer only listed why it would make the woman’s husband happier. Apparently, even feminine products need to be marketed to men.

Legal abortions in Pakistan are hard to come by, and although rape victims qualify, the victim needs her husband or male guardian’s permission to get an abortion, even if it is the husband or guardian that raped her.

Uneducated women, and even some educated ones, have no opportunity to consent to the choice of their husbands, even if the husband already has a handful of wives. Conversely, existing wives often don’t find out about their hubby’s new ones till after the wedding.

Selling daughters, often underage, or ‘giving’ them away to relatively richer and more powerful families is an accepted, if disgusting, cultural norm. Until recently, if a 16-year-old girl ran away from her arranged 80-year-old husband, a court would have returned her to her family. The same family that got her engaged to a decrepit old man.

See the problem?

The confessed criminal had to have gotten the disease from somewhere, and judging by what he thought would cure him, it’s quite certain that a woman of the night may have contributed. Or it may have been his female accomplice.

Who knows.

But what is known of the murderous duo, is that he is a masters degree holder, and she is a final-year masters student. On paper, these are two highly educated people, who would presumptively have learnt something of the world beyond their business degrees. In practice, they clearly knew nothing, and the term I wanted to refer to them by them is unprintable.

The only ‘saving grace’ is that since victim number two was the daughter of a senior police officer, the chances that these two make it to trial, or somehow are cut loose by the courts, are next to nil.

We live in country where fake peers and other quacks will say the cure to female infertility is in their bodies, and people buy it. We live in a country where talk on the matter between anyone, let alone parents and children, is so taboo that one would wonder why Pakistanis haven’t gone extinct. Yet, when it comes to love for pornography, we’re number one, at least according to Google’s data on certain search terms.

Maybe that explains why we haven’t gone extinct.

The writer is a sub editor on the Islamabad Desk. [e-mail]

Published in The Express Tribune, March 3^rd, 2013.