"On the night of July 18, 2017, at about 2am I was sleeping with my
children in my house when [...] my 16-year-old daughter was taken away
[by three men]." "We implored the culprits to leave my daughter alone, but [they]
threatened us that if anyone came forward they would be killed." Mother, second victim: police report
"(The second victim)'s two elder sisters
were initially called, but the elders decided that (17-year-old) Victim
B would be the one to take the punishment."
"Her mothers and sisters all protested this but the elders brought out their guns and threatened to kill them."
Muzaffarabad Station House report
The distraught young victim sat on the bed says she was subjected to a revenge rape at the orders of the village council -- Daily Mail
"Pancayats have no standing and the courts have stated the same." "If they act outside of law, then the panchayat and its members should be prosecuted according to law." Asma Jahangir, human rights lawyer, Pakistan
Panchayats are village elders who come together as a village council to decide on matters of tribal law. They sit to consider a situation that has developed that is disturbing to the community, and commune to come to a decision on how the issue should be addressed. It has not been uncommon on countries like Pakistan and India that such councils will instruct their community members to act in a way that is meant to exact justice, but succeeds instead in furthering injustice.
Particularly when it applies to women being punished for the misdeeds of men resulting in women and girls becoming doubly victimized. Pakistan is ranked, with good reason, as the world's third most dangerous place to be a woman, according to a 2011 Thomson Reuters Foundation survey. "Honour killings" destroy the lives of over one thousand women and girls annually, according to Pakistan's Human Rights Commission. Long-overdue laws have been passed to outlaw "honour killings", criminalizing this violence against women, but tribal customs are difficult to dislodge.
As happened in 2002 with a woman by the name of Mukhtar Mai who was dragged into a house, gang-raped and thrown back out naked while 200 tribal leaders witnessed the punishment meted out to her family because her brother had been accused of conducting an affair with an older woman. Her trauma and humiliation through the violence and shame she suffered saw her do the unthinkable; file a police report, insist on an investigation and see that a court case resulted where most of the 14 men who had gang-raped her were acquitted by the presiding judges.
More recently, another case has surfaced of an extended family clan living within fairly close confines in a small village in Punjab province, Pakistan. A daughter of the family at 12 years of age, cutting grass in fields nearby the village on July 16 was raped by a 16-year-old relative. The elders of the family gathered to discuss the incident and decide what should follow to restore the family's honour. It is the honour of the family, the girl's parents and the extended family clan's honour that is focused on, not the crime committed against the girl.
In their wisdom it was decided by the elders in their "panchayat" deliberations that the brother of the young girl, himself 16, rape the teenage sister of the original rapist as punishment for his crime. One girl was raped, another girl was to be raped as punishment for the rape of the first girl. This is the kind of logic seen as justice through vengeance that satisfies the tribal code of brutally ignorant people who entirely disregard the harm done the girls. Not only will they have suffered dreadful violence and psychological trauma, but in the eyes of the village they will no longer have any currency as marriage partners. "They're victims and accused at the same time" stated Ahsan Younis, head of the Multan city police. "It's barbaric". The first assailant's father happened to be the brother of the second assailant's grandfather. The "honour crimes" that these reprehensible rapes represent were reported to the Violence Against Women Centre in Multan, leaving authorities to have little option but to arrest the two men involved, but as police realized dozens of other family members were involved, the arrests of 29 people, members of the extended family were authorized.
The mother of the first accused man had in desperation offered either of her two married daughters to see the 'score' settled on the condition that the first victim's family agree it would not take legal action against her son. This did not suit the purposes of the elders who instead demanded that she order her unmarried teenage daughter be taken by the men who intended to see to her punishment through rape. Police head Ahsan Younis observed that the two men who stand accused of the rapes could face the death penalty, but "that is up to the court".
Thoroughly Medieval in the extent of their brutality; the tribal customs and the type of justice reflected in both society at large and the country's system of justice.
Anti-rape protests swept Delhi after a high-profile gang rape case in 2012 [Getty Images]In Utter Pradesh, gang rape videos have become very popular items. This is a state in northern India with a population of over 200 million. It is a deeply patriarchal culture with a political culture known to be one of thuggishness. Rapes have been on the increase there, much more so than elsewhere in India. Rapes have doubled in incidence, from 2014 to 2015. Two years ago Mulayam Singh Yadav, leader of the state's governing political party spoke against the death penalty: "These are boys, they make mistakes", he said.
"I decided I had a single goal. Justice." "I have thought about this continuously. Why did they do this to me? Why did they ruin my life -- just because they had money and I'm poor?" "Everybody knows about the case, people from my neighbourhood. At the same time I've lost my dignity, I've lost my childhood, he's [the leader of the gang that raped her] living a happily married life." 24-year-old student
Courts
in India are overburdened, with rampant judge shortages and 22 million
pending cases — some taking 10 or more years to complete. In one case, a
woman who was gang-raped in 2005, when she was a teenager, waited 11
years for a guilty verdict for the ringleader in the case, and it's not
over yet. The young woman, pictured above, is now in her 20s. (Annie
Gowen/The Washington Post)
The young woman has refused to surrender her battle for justice. In 2005 she had been gang-raped. The daughter of a poor man who earned a living as a scrap dealer, she was walking along a road with her younger brother, her job as a housemaid finished for the day. It was raining, and they were heading home. A car with four drunk young men, 17 to 19 years of age, stopped and forced her into the car, driving away leaving her little brother frightened and crying.
The girl, then 13 years old, was forcibly confined, raped, sodomized, and repeatedly burned with a cigarette lighter, for hours of tormented horror. After they were finished with her the men dropped her off on the side of the road, tossed a 20-rupee bill at her and drove off. She dragged herself off the road, came across village women, and asked for their help. When R.KS. Rathore, the current deputy inspector general of Lucknow police first saw her bleeding and limping at the police station, his impression was that "It was quite evident she had been brutally handled".
In a way she was fortunate. Despite the horrors inflicted on her as a vulnerable child, she wasn't murdered, as so often happens to poor young girls after they've been gang-raped. In many of these instances, the rapes aren't reported to authorities, since complaints of this nature are common and often shunted aside; police are rarely sympathetic, and many of the rapes are at the hands of privileged sons of wealthy local people with connections.
As it was, taken to an emergency room, a female physician undertook a rape examination. The girl was hospitalized because of excessive bleeding that went on for weeks, but the female physician reported there was no bleeding, and nor was any note made of the burns on her body, witnessed by police. The girl's hymen, she noted, was no loner intact, but she concluded "no definite opinion about rape" could be reached.
The family was threatened, urged to drop the case. The leader of the young men who raped her was the 18-year-old son of a wealthy man. Police, recognizing the potential of the threats, had the girl taken from her family and placed in protective custody, where she was locked into a facility for runaway girls for a period of a year and a half, only allowed to see her parents a few times each month. Eventually the man Shukla was arrested along with five of his accomplices.
Two of the men were convicted in 2007, while a third was convicted in 2013. Two juveniles were sent to detention facilities and both later died in separate car accidents. But Shukla, the son of the wealthy well-connected man had his attorneys enlisted in legal battles to prove he was a juvenile, not an adult when the crime occurred. Lower court trials in India can take over six years, and even longer, with appeals.
At
night in the city of Lucknow, a few women on the streets stick to the
main lighted streets. (Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The girl languished with her life on hold, aching to return to school, to be able to venture out to the market, live a normal life. The world had been shocked when news came out internationally of a fatal gang rape of a Delhi college student on a bus in 2012. The world attention focused on India compelled the government to act to confront its epidemic of sex assaults against girls and women, with men acting with the impunity of those knowing the penalties were slight to non-existent.
Gaurav
Shukla after he was convicted in the gang-rape case in a fast-track
court in Lucknow, India, on April 13. (Ajay Kumar/The Times Of India
Group)
Shukla was charged with forging a high school certificate claiming him to be a minor at the time of the rape. When the courageous and determined young woman, now in her mid-20s testified at court, she was so tense she vomited. "After all these years, the wait is finally over", she said. Perhaps choosing to forget that though found guilty her attacker could still be freed on bail awaiting appeal of his conviction, dragging the case on for years yet.
It is a case of honour killing. The couple were not beheaded, but were killed with the knives and had severe signs of torture on their heads." Muhammad Pervaiz, Satrah, Punjab police chief
According to the FIR, the couple's family tied them up in public and beheaded them in a village near Sialkot.—File photo
"Their legs and arms were tied while their mouths were gagged with pieces of cloth. The father of the girl announced loudly that he was going to slit the throat of [his] daughter and her husband." "He said they should learn what would happen to them [children urged to witness the murders] if they married someone of their own choice." Muhammad Ijaz, neighbour
It was first reported that Sajjad Ahmed, 31 and his bride Muafia Bibi 17, had been beheaded in a grisly 'honour killing' that took place in Satrah, Punjab province in Pakistan. Neighbours have since denied the beheading; they were, they claim, stabbed to death in the presence of family and neighbours, including children whom the young woman's father who led the killing, insisted it would be instructive to the children to watch.
The young couple had their throats slit and onlookers watched as they then bled to death. This is Pakistan, after all, where honour killings are common enough that human rights groups claim 900 were reported in 2013, though it is generally believed that the number is grossly under-reported.
Residents of this town explained that relatives of the young woman had convinced the couple they supported the marriage, inviting them to the town. Once there, they were drugged.They hadn't long to live, after that. It was a particularly gruesome honour killing. Hundreds of which go virtually unnoticed every year, considered by authorities as representative of domestic accidents or suicides.
They were slaughtered to restore family honour. The young woman evidently married without the consent of her father. For that cardinal cultural social sin she paid dearly. Police are said to have arrested five people who were involved in the atrocity, which is to say 'honour' killing.
A
Pakistani woman Nargas Bibi shows family pictures of her son Sajjad
Ahmed and his wife Muafia Bibi, who were killed by Bibi’s parents, at
her house in Hussain Abad village near Sialkot, Pakistan, Sunday, June
29, 2014. AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary
In an earlier well publicized case of a couple who had married without her father's consent and who had been bludgeoned to death by her relatives outside a courthouse on a busy Lahore street, Pakistan's prime minister demanded that police chiefs explain why they had done nothing to intervene.
This represents a general opinion site for its author. It also offers a space for the author to record her experiences and perceptions,both personal and public. This is rendered obvious by the content contained in the blog, but the space is here inviting me to write. And so I do.
