Serial incompetence

The rape of a five-year-old girl on September 13th last year produced national and international headlines. To date, and despite at least 186 alleged suspects having been interviewed and cleared of any involvement, there has been no progress on the case. The child remains traumatised and is likely to remain so for many years, possibly never to fully recover, and her family find themselves at the centre of unwelcome media intrusion. From the outset, the police appear to have donned a mantle of multiple failures, whether it is in the collection of forensic evidence or wrongly arresting people for a crime that apparently they did not commit.

Everybody who is anybody in the political and legal firmament has had their say, mostly to little or no effect. Two chief justices have taken suo-motu notices, and the Punjab chief minister has also taken out a legal notice, all to no perceptible effect. Investigative teams have been formed and fallen by the wayside, politicians both in the government and opposition have garnered airtime on news channels calling for this-that-and-the-other, adding their voices to the cacophony.

None of this matters a hill of beans unless there is a police service that is capable of detecting and prosecuting a child’s rapist, and it is manifestly obvious that that is not the case. The police services of Pakistan are stuck in a 1950s time warp, and possessed of the sensitivity of a falling brick along with the forensic competencies of a tree-sloth. Rape is frequently dismissed as a trivial matter be it adult or child, and successful prosecutions for rape extremely rare. All the suo-motu notices in the world are an irrelevance unless there is both the will and the capacity to act on them. Both are absent as in this tragic case. As is evidenced by an increasing number of cases reported in the media, sexual offences against minors is rising nationwide.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 8^th, 2014.

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