Punishing daughters

It was not going to be long before the jahalat in some ranks of our culture caught up with humanity to wipe it clean. This refers to the recent story out of Faisalabad, in which a woman attempted suicide while simultaneously attempting to murder her three daughters over pressure by her husband and in-laws to bear a male child. The family truly believed that the woman could singlehandedly manipulate her own genetics — a task that we have left up to scientists for now. This lack of education led to multiple tragedies in this household; not only did the in-laws drive the woman into depression and suicide, the woman attempted murder on her three young daughters, resulting in, at least, one death.

We might dismiss the woman’s attempted suicide as an internal family matter rather than as a case that needs legal attention. However, this is a tiny thread in the fabric of jahalat that is being woven by every uneducated person out there. Of course, it is a complicated case wherein we might say the mother was not sane to be charged with attempted murder of her three daughters but this must be investigated. The trigger of the episode should be the greater investigation at hand and indicates the dire need for the dissemination of information about birth and the role of genetics at a basic level.

From the in-laws’ vantage point, the woman’s husband should also then be taken to task for not bearing a son, but this would be counterproductive to the aim of spreading knowledge to people like these. While Pakistan is still fighting polio and other epidemics, we must seriously consider taking on a campaign to spread knowledge about how the sex of a child is determined. This issue has been coming along for hundreds of years, since the time that baby girls were buried alive after being born. Shameful it is that centuries later, some of us are still hostage to the thinking that sons are superior to daughters.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 7^th, 2014.

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