On her ‘honour’

The lives of innocent young Pakistani women continue to be taken at the hands of twisted mindsets, which believe gruesome violence will bring so-called ‘honour’ to their families. The stories are the same almost every time but the names are different. The men call them ‘honour’ killings. The rest of the world calls them homicide. In the most recent tragedy, the male members of a 25-year-old woman’s own family stoned her to death outside the Lahore High Court (LHC) — a public area, in the middle of the day —for her desire to marry the man of her choice.

A woman’s free will is a seemingly lost concept in Pakistani culture and wherever some Pakistanis go, they appear to carry their warped mindsets with them. In New York on May 21, a 75-year-old Pakistani immigrant beat his wife to death for fixing him a vegetarian meal. The great tragedy for the nation, alongside the murder of another innocent Pakistani woman, is that the man’s lawyer claimed the man acted on his cultural upbringing where beating women is customary. We certainly have progress to make in the way of improving our global image and changing the way society sees women, especially those who want to take independent decisions. For the 25-year-old woman murdered outside the LHC, her father had no qualms in shamelessly admitting that he murdered his daughter on the notion of ‘honour’.

According to published reports, around 1,000 women are reported murdered as honour killings in Pakistan each year but the government does not keep a record of these types of murders and injustices. It is as if the government is trying to hide the ugly truth. However, it must recognise that there is a grave problem where a major chunk of its population either thinks that there’s nothing wrong with beating women or are bystanders when others do. In cases of honour killing, families are able to forgive convicts and let them walk free. This represents a fatal flaw in the system. A person responsible for the murder of a citizen should be subject to the jurisdiction of the state only, as should anyone involved in abetting the crime. Once we reform our laws and make examples out of transgressors, we will be able to advance in the area of human rights and social justice.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 29^th, 2014.

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