#HangTheRapists: Why Capital Punishment is Just the Tip of the Iceberg When It Comes to Solving Paki
Pakistan is waking up to the misogyny and normalisation of abuse which dictates laws and the attitudes of our nation. Still, the country’s gripe with sexual assault requires long term change, not short-term retribution.
Trigger warning: this article contains mentions of capital punishment, rape, sexual assault to minors, suicide, child abuse and violence.
In the early hours of Wednesday 9th September, on the M-11 motorway between Sialkot and Lahore, a woman’s car stopped on the side of the road as it had run out of petrol. While the woman driving, who had left Lahore Defence sometime earlier with her children and was on her way to Gujranwala, tried to arrange for help, the family were approached by two men. They smashed the windows of the car and held the family at gunpoint. They threatened them and forced them to walk to the nearby fields. They raped the woman and forced her young children to watch. The woman was found later on the side of the road, bloodied and terrified.
The story made headlines and from the widespread sharing of this horrific incident came an equally loud outcry from the Pakistani community both at home and abroad. There were vocal demands for hunting down the rapists, for hanging them publicly in the streets and to continue this practice with every person found to commit sexual assault. Pakistan’s relationship with capital punishment goes back a long way, and rape is a crime that is answered with a death penalty or a lengthy jail sentence in the country.
Despite carrying such a heavy punishment, the prevalence of sexual assault in Pakistan is staggering.
According to a study by Human Rights Watch, every two hours, someone is raped in Pakistan, and every eight hours, a gang rape is committed.
Stories of sexual assault are frequently in the news, yet it seems as though nothing is changing; that the number of cases is going up rather than down.
Sahil, an organisation dedicated to raising awareness about child abuse, reported in a 2019 study that an average of 11 sexual abuse cases involving children is reported daily in Pakistan. One of the most notable cases involved 7-year-old Zainab Ansari from Kasur, Punjab, who was raped and murdered by Imran Ali, who was deemed responsible for several other cases of sexual abuse and murder in the area. Ali was executed following a nationwide demand for change and his execution, and yet the number of rape cases in Pakistan continued to rise.
Speaking at a rally in Islamabad on 12th September 2020, Ismat Shahjahan, president of the Women Democratic Front (WDF) blamed the fact that the state was pursuing harsh punishments, instead of addressing the underlying culture of sexual abuse that is rife in Pakistan:
“If you demand public hangings, will you hang half of Pakistan on street corners? … There are rapists [in this country] from mosques to the Parliament.”
Rape culture continues to perpetuate almost all aspects of Pakistani culture, be it in the shows we watch, the conversations we have, the way we view marriage, or the way politicians and mullahs conduct themselves and talk about sexual assault.
Following the case of the woman on the M-11, Capital City Police Officer (CCPO) Umar Sheikh commented that the victim should have checked her car’s tank was full before setting off on her journey and taken the more monitored GT Road instead of the motorway. These comments attracted much criticism and spoke volumes about the extent of victim-blaming that still exists in Pakistan, and perhaps most troublingly, within the very institutions that victims turn to for help. Sheikh’s views are nothing new. The comment sections under many posts about sexual abuse within Pakistan echoes similar sentiments: women shouldn’t travel alone, they should not wear revealing clothing and wear a dupatta, they should stay home after dark.
However, none of these factors stops rape.
Rape is still committed when the victim is not alone, as seen in the case of Mukhtar Mai, who’s rape was sanctioned by her village council in front of her peers. Rape is still committed when women are covered from head to toe, as seen when young girls are abused, like 13-year-old Khainat Soomro, who was kidnapped and gang-raped in broad daylight while buying a toy for her cousin on her journey back from school.
Rape is still committed when the victim is at home, as seen with the case of Dr Shazia Khalid, who was assaulted in her own home by an intruder. In all of the mentioned cases, the accused were acquitted of their crimes, and there were zero convictions. There’s a tendency to victim blame, leading to disparity in the number of cases that occur with those reported to the police.
Sarah Zaman, a board member with the advocacy group War Against Rape (WAR), explained in a 2013 interview that this likely has to do with the fact that speaking out about rape is “equated with defiance”. Victims are often blackmailed by their communities and by those who perpetuated the rape.
In all three cases aforementioned, the women involved were threatened into silence by the authorities. All three were forced to flee their homes, with Soomro’s older brother killed in revenge for her speaking out.
Another issue often emerges as when high-profile or respected individuals are involved in cases of sexual assault, they collude with authorities and are usually cleared of their charges. This was seen in 2014 when three sons of a Pakistani politician, Mian Farooq, were cleared of rape charges even though they had abducted and raped three teenage girls over several days and had video documented the crime.
In the case of Dr Khalid, the man accused was an army officer named Captain Hammad. When Khalid was insistent in pushing charges against him, then-Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf publicly insisted Khalid was wrong and continued to discredit her case in interviews after that. Khalid and her husband faced repeated threats by the authorities and were forced to leave the country.
The extent of Pakistan’s problem with rape is so broad that it spans the gender divide, as male, transgender, and non-binary persons also face stigma for reporting cases of sexual assault. Of particular note in these cases are a series of cases of child molesting by Mullahs and mosque teachers across the nation.
A recent case involved a molvi caught on CCTV molesting a young boy in Punjab. This was one instance of several reported across Pakistan, all of which typically end with the cleric coercing families into dropping charges for fear of bringing shame to the family. Molvis fall into the category of respected individuals and are often supported by their fellow leaders in the mosque and cleared due to the lack of a central, independent authority that can investigate such cases.
Sexual abuse cases against transgender and non-binary persons are also rife within the country, with cases including that of 18-year-old Sharma, a transgender woman, who was abducted and brutally raped by nine men in the city of Peshawar in January 2019. The transgender community faces little to no support in matters such as these, and despite the government passing a historic act protecting the rights of transgender persons, they still face a significant amount of social stigma and de facto segregation by the public.
In both of these instances, it becomes clear that sexual assault faces a bigger problem than simply being about gender, it perpetuates almost every aspect of our culture and society, it does not discriminate on the grounds of gender, class, religion, or age. It is an epidemic that Pakistan, as a nation, needs to contain.
I believe that hanging the rapists responsible for the sexual assault of the unnamed woman on the Lahore-Sialkot motorway will achieve little if we, as a society and a culture, are unwilling to face the aspects of our culture that led these men to rape this woman in the first place.
It is quite frankly appalling that I have written this extensive article and there is still so much I have not addressed. Women are killed in the name of ‘honour’ after facing brutal assault, some crushing up their chuuriyaan and swallowing them to commit suicide.
The lack of legislation on marital rape means many cases go unreported and some face abuse at the hands of their spouse for years. The media normalises abuse in marriage by showing husbands slapping their wives in dramas or emotionally blackmailing them and throwing them out on the streets.
What change is happening is occurring at an achingly slow pace. Dramas like Udaari and films like Khuda Kay Liye have begun to push issues like child abuse and marital rape into the media spotlight, and the Aaurat March movement is making strides in the battle to normalise sex education and destigmatise victims of rape.
These movements, however, are mainly present only in urban areas like Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. In rural areas and tribal land, cases primarily go unreported, and victims suffer in silence for the rest of their lives.
If we push for change, we need to do so nationwide. We must bring the stories of those who do not have the means to do so themselves to the forefront of our national discourse and have the difficult conversations that we have been avoiding for years.
The authorities can continue to pursue the death penalty in the case of the woman who was raped along the M-11, as they do with most cases that spark similar amounts of national outrage. However, executing all the rapists in the country does not change the fact that our culture is mostly one of rape apology.
We tell women to cover up more, to not travel at night, not to travel alone, to fill up their tanks with petrol, to take the GT road and not the motorway, but we do not teach our community not to commit sexual assault.
We tell the children marred by these horrific acts to stay quiet for fear of shame but do not spread the notion that the victim is not at fault.
We continue to ignore calls for more effective sex education because it is against our culture without taking a step back and wondering if this ‘culture’ of placidity and passivity to sexual abuse in all its forms is what lies at the core of the problem in the first place.
We continue to pursue a Pakistan that shuns its sexual assault victims, that threatens the survivors who speak out, that places more importance in maintaining a toxic patriarchal culture of sexual assault apology than it does in removing this tarnish on our country.
