Violence against women in Pakistan

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The mistreatment of women in Pakistan was brought to world attention in 2002 by the gang rape of Mukhtaran Bibi and Dr.Shazia Khalid.

1 Introduction
2 Various forms of violence
3 Rape
4 Domestic Violence
5 Role of the Police and the Judges
6 The case of Farida S.
7 External links

[edit] Introduction

Zia ul-Haq's coup in 1977 represented the convergence of conservative religious interests with those of the army. He used appeals to Islamic values to legitimize his regime and cultivated the support of the conservative religious parties. Zia aimed at returning Pakistani to the "moral purity of early Islam." His targets were women, whom he promised to return to the sanctity of the chardivari (the four walls of the home), thus reaffirming women's domestic role as the cornerstone of a Muslim way of life.

Soon after the apparently progressive Benazir Bhutto had been elected in 1988 (a woman as Prime Minister!), it became clear, once again, that the protection of women's rights had been subordinated to the need to maintain a delicate balance between various political forces, including those representing conservative religious values. During her two incomplete terms in office, she did not repeal a single one of Zia's Islamization laws.

In 1990 and 1997 Nawaz Sharif, a political protégé of Zia's, was appointed Prime Minister. He followed a political strategy of Islamization akin to his mentor's, with detrimental consequences for women. For example, courts have repeatedly challenged an adult woman's right to marry of her own free will. Judges have looked to the Koran to settle the question, in some cases holding that a Muslim woman's marriage is illegal without familial consent. Today, there is a tendency to discourage "love marriages."

The literacy rate for Pakistani women is only 25 percent. Women's access to health and education is severely limited, and their levels of economic and political participation are very low, e.g. there are only 5 female members in the National Assembly out of a total of 207 and one woman among 483 male members of the four provincial legislatures (0.2 percent). Not surprisingly, in 1997 Pakistan slid back to 120th out of 146 places in the UN gender-related development index.

[edit] Various forms of violence

Women in Pakistan face the threat of multiple forms of violence, including sexual violence by family members, strangers, and police officers; domestic abuse, including spousal murder and being burned, disfigured with acid, beaten, and threatened; and ritual honor killings.

The most endemic form of violence faced by women is violence in the home. According to the Human Rights Commission, "the extreme forms it took included driving a woman to suicide or engineering an 'accident' (frequently the bursting of a kitchen stove) to cause her death, usually when the husband felt that the dower or other gifts he had expected from his in-laws in consequence of the marriage were not forthcoming, or/and he wanted to marry again, or he expected an inheritance from the death of his wife."

During 1997, the Lahore press reported an average of more than four local cases of women being burnt weekly, three of the four fatally. Police follow-up on these cases was negligible, with only six suspects taken into custody out of the 215 cases. In 1997, there was not a single conviction in a "stove-death" case in the country. The Lahore press also reported 265 homicides against women in the local area resulting from other forms of intra-family violence. In the majority of cases, husbands and in-laws were responsible for the murders, while in other cases the perpetrators were brothers and fathers. Honor killings or karo-kari are another recurrent form of familial violence against women. The perpetrators continue to find vindication in the eyes of both the law and society. The Sindh government alone has reported an annual figure of 300 for such honor killings, where a woman was suspected of an illicit liaison.

Sexual assault is also alarmingly common in Pakistan. the Human Rights Commission estimated that in 1997 at least eight women, more than half of them minors, were raped every twenty-four hours nationwide.

Despite the staggering levels of intra-family violence against women, it is widely perceived as a private family matter, not subject to government intervention let alone criminal sanction. At present there is virtually no prosecution of crimes of assault when perpetrated by male family members against women; even intra-family murder and attempted murder rarely are prosecuted.

[edit] Rape

In 1979 Pakistan's rape laws were dramatically changed when General Zia modified strategic aspects of the country's legal system in accordance with Islamic structures. Today, the burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove rape charges beyond a reasonable doubt. The only foolproof way to obtain a rape conviction is if the accused confesses. Otherwise, the courts have no consistent standards for proof of rape. Courts are very reluctant to hand down rape convictions in cases where there are no "marks of violence" on the victim's body.

The Federal Shariat Court repeatedly converts a rape conviction to one of fornication on the grounds that no violence was found on the victims' body, therefore, it could be reasonable to infer that the victim was a willing party to sexual intercourse. Stemming from a disinclination to credit female testimony about rape, courts alter the nature of the charges leveled by the prosecution and convict the defendant of the lesser crime of illegal consensual sex instead of rape. An even worse scenario resulting from judges' reluctance to convict in rape cases is that courts sometimes view a woman's charge of rape as an admission of illegal sex unless she can prove that the intercourse was non-consensual. Rape victims are susceptible to prosecution for illicit consensual sex. As Justice Javid Iqbal has written,

"The court considers the aggrieved party guilty until she proves herself innocent. Thus, when a woman files such a complaint of rape, instead of seeking justice she places herself at the mercy of the court."

[edit] Domestic Violence

Pakistani law is even more inadequate in protecting women victims of domestic violence, the majority of which involve domestic abuse or spousal murder. Police and judges have tended to treat it as a private or family matter.

Honor killings are a form of intra-family violence with victims who are mostly women, who are seen as the repositories of family honor. The Human Rights Commission reported a case in which a man was tried for killing his daughter and a young man when he found them in a "compromising state." The sessions (trial court) judge sentenced the father to life imprisonment. The case came before the Lahore High Court, which reduced the sentence to five years' imprisonment, because the victims were engaging in immoral behavior that could not be tolerated in an Islamic state such as Pakistan.

Skepticism and scorn about women's complaints of violence are rife among police officials, who function as gatekeepers with respect to women's access to the criminal justice system. One police officer told Human Rights Watch that non-consensual sexual intercourse virtually does not exist in Pakistan and that the absence of visible marks of violence would prove that intercourse was consensual.

[edit] Role of the Police and the Judges

Police officials in Karachi and Lahore dismissed domestic violence as a non-issue. When asked about the form of domestic abuse commonly referred to as "wife burning" or "dowry death", the director of the police training center in Lahore responded that women burned to death because "stoves were defective" and that "if someone wants to kill there are other means."

Even the medicolegal doctors who are responsible for collecting forensic medical evidence are unlikely to believe the complainants. The head medicolegal officer for Karachi, Dr. Nizamuddin Memon, who oversees all medicolegal services in the area, categorically denied the existence of rape, "A woman cannot be raped unless there are four or five men involved." He asserted that women lie when they allege that they were raped by an unassisted man. Dr. Memon told Human Rights Watch about an examinee who came to his office alleging that her brother had repeatedly raped her: "The police had believed her, but I did not. Fathers may rape daughters, often in old age when they are mentally off, but brothers do not go that far."

And according to Dr. Sikander Shah, then chief chemical examiner for Karachi, "Most women go with men willingly, then change their story under pressure.”

Biased and chauvinistic attitudes are also common among prosecutors. A prosecutor from the Lahore District Attorney's office told Human Rights Watch: "I don't believe in rape cases. Women's consent is always there. Our society does not allow rape." Police Inspector Legal Naseer Ahmed, Lahore, told Human Rights Watch that virtually all rape cases are fabricated. Even the advocate general of Punjab, Khalid Ranjha, denied that rape is a problem in Pakistan. "In Pakistan there is no rape as a consequence of sexual frustration. Rape in the west is a sickness. Ours is not a sick society."

Since the police system is generally the point of first contact with the criminal justice system, women victims, in seeking justice for sexual or other assault, encounter obstacles from the very beginning of the process. Harassment, intimidation, and physical abuse of persons seeking the services of the police are common phenomena, indicating endemic corruption in the police force. Women who allege rape or abuse are vulnerable to police misconduct owing to women's low status in Pakistani society and the stigma that is still attached to rape and domestic abuse.

Rejection of their complaints without investigation is the most common problem encountered by women victims of violence at the police station. In fact, the reputation of the police is so uniformly bad in this respect that many women are deterred from reporting violence and consider contacting the police to be a futile endeavor. For many victims, the experience of confronting skeptical and dismissive police officers intensifies the trauma of the assault itself.

The case of Raheela A., a young housewife who tried to register a complaint of rape with the Karachi police, illustrates several of the problems described above. Raheela A. was raped by two men who broke into her home in Karachi. In the course of the attack she suffered knife wounds and was knocked unconscious when her head was bashed against a wall. Later the same day, after obtaining medical treatment, Raheela A. and her husband went to the police station to file a report (FIR). Raheela A. gave her statement to the police, but the sub-inspector on duty discouraged her from filing a complaint and pressured her to forgive her attackers or to come to a compromise with them. The police kept Raheela A. and her husband waiting at the police station for two nights. "The sub-inspector kept stalling," Raheela A. told Human Rights Watch, "and finally registered the FIR on the third day" after she and her husband paid him Rs. 7,000 (approximately U.S. $140). Futhermore, the police incorrectly recorded the sequence of events narrated by Raheela A., which caused her subsequent testimony to be discredited for inconsistency.

[edit] The case of Farida S.

Farida S. encountered similar problems as Raheela A. (see above) when she tried to report the rape of her twelve-year-old daughter, Ayesha, by a distant male relative in 1996. Farida S. went to the police station in Lahore on the day of the attack, but the police refused to record a complaint and instead advised her to reconcile with the accused. When she persisted, they asked her to produce the accused but turned her away when she offered to lead them to his house. The next day Farida S. returned to the police station, and this time a senior officer demanded a bribe of Rs. 5,000 (approximately $100). The FIR was finally registered another two days later when Farida S.'s employer (she worked in domestic service) intervened on her behalf.

Farida S. told Human Rights Watch about police misconduct during the investigation of rape charges filed on behalf of her minor daughter, Ayesha. Shortly after Farida S. filed the charges, her house was attacked by the defendant's family members and she and her relatives were beaten. When Farida S. went to report the incident to the police station, the duty officer rudely dismissed her and told her to have a male relative speak for her. Farida S. had an exchange of words with the officer, who cursed and swore at her and threatened to detain her. When a male neighbor accompanying her offered to intervene, the police briefly took him into custody. The duty officer later briefly detained Farida S.'s two sons-in-law and filed minor criminal charges against her husband and two sons, one of whom was eleven years old. According to Farida S., the officer offered to drop charges against her family members if she reached a settlement in her daughter's rape case. Finally, three months later, Farida S. appealed to a judge who dismissed the charges against her husband and younger son; her eighteen-year-old elder son was detained and granted bail about a month later.

Farida S. told Human Rights Watch that the police took absolutely no action after registering an FIR for the rape of her minor daughter, Ayesha, despite the fact that the accused was known to be in the neighborhood. After she made several trips to exhort them to investigate, the police finally accompanied Farida S. to her neighborhood, where she pointed out the accused at a roadside eatery. The police, however, took so long to park their vehicle that he easily absconded, and when Farida S. asked the police to make another attempt, she was told to have the police van refueled for the purpose. Moreover, a senior officer pointedly asked Farida S. for a bribe of Rs. 5000 (approximately $100). Throughout the process, the police constantly discouraged Farida S. from pursuing the case and pressured her to reach a truce with the defendant, at times taunting her that they would make no effort to investigate. They did not even take statements from the victim, Ayesha; Ayesha's younger brother, who was an eye witness to the rape; or Farida S.'s cousin, who saw the defendant leaving Farida S.'s yard, until two months after the incident when Farida S.'s lawyer, who knew the station chief, intervened. Other than Ayesha's medicolegal examination, conducted few days after she was raped, that was the extent of the investigation.