EDITORIAL: #Pakistan - Violence, assaults against women

It is very clear that shameful, sickening incidents like the one in Lahore on Independence Day, when a 400-storng mob harassed, assaulted, and stole from a female ticktoker after tearing her clothes off in front of everybody, are not isolated events and need to be dealt with very strongly. Just the other day normal, law-abiding and women-respecting Pakistanis were aghast at headlines narrating the ordeal of a 50-year old woman from Mazaffargarh in Punjab, who was also stripped, paraded and burnt with cigarette butts, after an attempt of rape was unsuccessful, just because her son married the daughter of an influential person who didn’t approve of the match.

Such trends put the spotlight squarely on the government. Because, at the end of the day, so many people can get away with so many such assaults because they know that the law will not catch up with them. And it’s not that we don’t have laws to protect women and stop people from assaulting others at whim. It’s just that the state does not have the will, or perhaps the capacity, to implement them with force. The only reason that most advanced countries have been able to overcome such problems is that they have made sure that nobody interferes with the legal process once it takes over relevant proceedings. And when people see for themselves what happens to people who break the law, it’s understandable that they are not too inclined to take it into their own hands too frequently after it.

Pakistan has clearly become a place where women are not given the respect and social status by most people that the law grants them. And the biggest reason is that the law is not always made to catch up with people who abuse it. How could we become a place where hundreds of people would choose to go out of their way, climb over a fence, and assault a woman in broad daylight, tearing away her clothes, tossing her around like a rag doll, and stripping her of her valuables as well as her dignity? It’s a good thing that Prime Minister Imran Khan himself has taken note of this travesty of justice and the police is moving to identify culprits through video footage. But the Punjab government has some serious explaining to do. How could an unruly crowd feel so confident about tearing the law to shreds in the heart of the provincial capital like this? Why did the police take hours to respond to the incident? And why is the security setup moving so slowly with this case? It has badly exposed the Buzdar setup, which must also be made to answer for this grave miscarriage of justice. The perpetrators of this crime must be caught and given extraordinary punishment so that once people see the state reacting with an iron fist, nobody ever dares to cross such lines again. https://dailytimes.com.pk/806096/violence-assaults-against-women/