Getting away with it

Rape of a woman be she rich or poor, moral or immoral, is not just a crime, but a scathing slight on entire society

The rape of a woman be she rich or poor, moral or immoral, is not just a crime, but a scathing slight on the entire society. Under no circumstances, ever, is a woman ‘asking for’ this heinous physical brutality — be it a prostitute, a dancer, a street woman or a woman dressed in any ‘provocative’ way. The horror of rape is multiplied by the experience of gang rape, the very pinnacle of human depravity.

Gang rape is not uncommon in Pakistan with most weeks throwing up at least one such incident reported somewhere in the country. This type of rape has had heavy precedent from every province of Pakistan and the victims are typically poor women or girls. One such case has achieved brief prominence, mainly because the victim was able to register a case against those accused of sexually assaulting her. Three of the men accused of the act were the sons of a PML-N MNA. The case was soon stopped dead in its tracks as the victim was unwilling to give blood for a DNA test.



The victim had been medically examined and it was established beyond a doubt that she had been raped multiple times by more than one man. It is more than likely that pressure, in the form of bribing and harassment, has been brought to bear on the victim and her family owing to which the case has been withdrawn. The victim is poor, so is her family. Her alleged assailants are rich and powerful, well connected in all the right places and are able to manipulate the scales of justice to their own advantage. She was not raped by ghosts, but by flesh-and-blood men, who now walk away, protected by the impunity their position, a flimsy legal system, and a society likes to lie by its silence whenever a woman undergoes such a plight. Part of the problem is the invisible social pressure faced by a rape survivor in a self-righteous society, which has a habit of exonerating a rapist and humiliating those who have been raped. This traps all the discourse on rape in a ‘they-asked-for-it’ narrative, forever making the rape survivor a victim of slut-shaming.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 16^th, 2014.

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