Outlook
Violence Against Women: Pakistan's position
Mohammed AsifSouth Asia is among the worst cases in the world with respect to violence against women. Pakistan is not an exception, too.
In Pakistan, women live under the plethora of feudal, tribal, Islamic and British laws. These laws present unique, complex and often a fair and unfair treatment to women. The country is bound by international conventions, CEDAW for example, to undertake certain measures for women’s rights. It has laws in favor of women too. But not every law and its implementation mechanism is sensitive towards women. In this chaos, a Pakistani woman’s problems are complex, varied and local in nature and they cannot be always explained by blanket causes or solved through typical solutions.
In broader terms, women are victims of social, political and economic biases in Pakistan. As the result of them, investment on them in social, political and economic spheres of domestic and national fronts is marginal understandably. Consequentially, they become victims of the same vicious circle. They are victims of domestic violence, violent customary practices, insult, innuendoes, rape, harassment and trafficking. They are treated as ‘half humans’ and a battle ground of “honor” or a symbol of “weakness”. It is equally unfortunate that shameful demonstration of most of the said acts remain shrouded under cover of “family affair”.
Statistics cannot give the true feeling of agony, shame and depression that Pakistani women face. However, for a quick view, in Pakistan, 1202 women were killed in year 2007 alone. Of them all, 636 were killed in the name of honor. There were about 755 women who were sexually harassed of which 377 women were raped and 354 women were gang-raped. Likewise, 736 women were kidnapped and 143 women were burnt with acid or fire. This is country where case of wife-bashing occurs every 3 seconds, where 50 women die every day during child birth and where only 8 % women have their say in the choice of their marriage in rural areas where 67 % of the population of Pakistan resides. A research paper of World Bank, in October 2007, revealed that one fifth of the women in their sample had recorded to have been “physically hurt, by their husbands in at least one of the following ways: pushed, hit, slapped, kicked, thrown, choked, burned or attacked with a weapon”. In a similar survey conducted by White Ribbon Campaign in 2007, 71 % men justify beating their wives. So, no wonder then that even a renowned leader like Benazir Bhutto gets assassinated and the establishment reveals the same evening that it was actually her fault to address a political rally. No wonder that a Chief Minister Sindh (now Ex) surprises the nation one bad day that women’s rule was ominous for the country and storm in Karachi and the subsequent human and material loss was actually a warning from God…and the man was not taken to the task for giving such an irresponsible, rather a stupid statement. Similarly, it’s also no wonder that Ex-President of Pakistan noted in an event abroad that women get raped in Pakistan because it gives some of them an opportunity to immigrate to developed countries. So, there is a long list of such incidents which speak of the deteriorating conditions with regards to women in Pakistan in the social context.
Like the social settings, violence against women in politics is also omnipresent. It is internalized, institutionalized and very much thriving (also courtesy war on terror) phenomenon.
