Women’s Day (Auret March) in 2018. Despite the growth of feminism and activism against gender-based violence, women still fear attacks in public places in Pakistan. Credit: Zofeen T Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
Karachi, Oct 12 2021 (IPS)

The mauling, groping and tossing of a young woman by a crowd of between 300 and 400 men in a park in the eastern city of Lahore, in the Punjab province, may have caused a wave of country-wide disgust, but speaks volumes of how unsafe public spaces are for Pakistani women.

“If I’m not safe in my own city, I can never be safe in any corner of the world,” said the woman survivor, also a TikTokker, in an interview narrating the incident that occurred on Pakistan’s 74th day of independence and was captured on videos that went viral soon after.

Actor Ushna Shah echoed the same sentiment on Twitter: “What else has to happen for every single person to accept the fact that women are not safe in Pakistan. Women are not safe.”

Sheema Kermani says her dancers pack up and leave public spaces when confronted.

“Over the years, public spaces for women in Pakistan have been decreasing,” lamented Sheema Kermani, a renowned classical dancer, and founder of Karachi-based Tehrik-e-Niswan, a women’s rights group. She and her group have had their share of unwarranted episodes, performing in public spaces, even doing street theatre. They have had stones hurled at them or have been asked to stop their performance, in which case they pack up immediately and leave to “avoid confrontation”.

Despite more women joining the workforce and the emergence of young feminist groups that have “actually pushed for making public spaces safe for women,” Kermani observed, “the last couple of years has taken Pakistani society back many hundreds of years” where women are “hated, demeaned, exploited, abused, even raped”. She added: “It is as if their lives are of little consequence.”

And that is what the TikTokker felt when she said: “They [men] were playing with me,” as they ripped off her clothes.

This incident comes just weeks after the beheading of a former diplomat’s daughter in the capital. Another undated video that went viral, following the TikTokker’s assault, showed a man lunging towards two women riding on the back of a rickshaw and is heard kissing one of them. Police are investigating yet another video of a woman being stripped by a group of men in a park.

Prime Minister Imran Khan does not make it easier either when he blames women for these crimes that he says are “spreading like cancer”. “Wearing very few clothes,” he said, will have an “impact on the men unless they are robots”. In 2019, the information minister quoted the Prime Minister for blaming TikTok, a social media platform, for the “growing obscenity and vulgarity in society”.

“But I was not even vulgarly dressed,” the TikTok survivor had said in her interview.

Maria Memon was shaken to the core after experiencing verbal abuse.

“I can well imagine this woman’s trauma,” said TV anchorperson Maria Memon.

She had faced an unruly mob while covering an anti-government protest sit-in by the now ruling Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI), in Faisalabad, also in Punjab, in 2014, that had left her “shaken to the core” after being attacked by a volley of verbal abuse.

“They wanted to see me break down,” she said. When that did not happen, they started “throwing empty plastic water bottles and sticks at me,” she told IPS over the phone from Islamabad, the country’s capital.

Seven years later, said Memon, Pakistani women journalists remain “untrained”, “unprepared”, and “vulnerable” to a crowd that can quickly turn violent. While media outlets want to send women to these events, they seldom have a contingency escape plan to quickly evacuate them when things get rough.

In 2018, the London-based Thomson Reuters Foundation ranked Pakistan the sixth most dangerous country and fifth on non-sexual violence, including domestic abuse in the world for women.

Sana Mirza recalls her own humiliating incident and salutes those who report harassment.

“Unless these men are not punished, there will be no stopping them,” said Sana Mirza, Memon’s colleague, who faced a similar situation in another PTI rally in Lahore, just a few weeks after Memon, in 2014.

Unlike Memon, she broke down in front of the camera, “feeling humiliated,” she said, and the episode continued haunting her, and she refused to go out in the field for a good eight months. “I even removed myself from social media as these platforms had become too toxic, and I was unable to sleep,” she told IPS over the phone from Islamabad.

While many women, had they experienced what the TikTokker’s went through, would have kept silent, Mirza said, she saluted this woman “for her courage to lodge a complaint to the police”.

So far, over 60 men have been arrested after they were identified through the video using the national database. The police have geo-fenced 28,000 people and shortlisted 350 suspects, and the arrests continue.

But Mirza remains unconvinced the arrested men arrested will be punished. “They never are. Just look at the statistics!” she said.

According to Karachi-based War Against Rape, while sexual assault and rape cases have increased, the conviction rate is less than 3%. And this figure is about the crimes that are reported.

Amna Baig believes that women should report incidents as non-reporting emboldens the perpetrators.

While the “system may not be perfect”, Amna Baig, an Islamabad-based policewoman, defending the police system by not reporting such incidents was “emboldening” perpetrators. She termed the complaint filing by the TikTok user, albeit three days late, a very “courageous” step.

In her five years of being in the force at various cities in Punjab, she said, she had come across several murders of women by their spouses. Still, neither the deceased nor any family member ever filed a complaint of domestic violence (DV) before the murder.

“You can save so many lives if you report,” she said, adding, “Just lodging a complaint can act as a deterrent because the person knows he will be held accountable”.

Interestingly, Baig feels “safer” and “empowered” in a police uniform than in plain clothes. “I think the uniform exudes both the fear factor as well as respect,” and has never been harassed while on duty.

Still, it is not too late to ensure “women’s choices, voices, and lives count” if you ask Senator Sherry Rehman.

It was time to bring to life the domestic violence bill that she had first introduced back in 2004, as a member of the national assembly, but which she continues to stumble “on the barriers of misogyny and anti-women lobbies”.

The Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) is vetting it to ensure it is in tandem with the Shariah [Islamic law].

“Why are only legislations related to women sent to the CII?” asked Rehman. “Like the rest, these too, can be discussed in the parliament, and their fate decided through voting just the way other bills are discussed and passed,” she added.

While she admitted no one law or series of laws would change the game, moving the law is the starting point, not the endpoint for change.

“Without baseline laws against domestic violence, for instance, such as the one in Sindh, the courts won’t have the legal scaffolding to provide the relief even if they are so inclined,” she pointed out.

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A young girl whose family fled the Boko Haram insurgency stands in front of a tent in a camp for internally displaced persons in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Boko Haram has abducted thousands of girls and forced them into unwanted marriages and enslavement. According to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), less than one percent of humanitarian aid is spent on combating gender-based violence in crises. Credit: Sam Olukoya/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, May 27 2019 (IPS)

It’s time to end sexual and gender-based violence once and for all, participants of a two-day conference said.

In Norway, United Nations agencies, governments and civil society convened for the first-ever thematic humanitarian conference to combat sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in humanitarian crises.

The conference, which brought together representatives from 100 nations and over 200 organisations and SGBV survivors, aimed to mobilise political and financial commitments as well as strengthen effective and multi-sectoral SGBV prevention and response.

“We cannot, and must not, pretend these atrocities are not taking place. Sexual and gender-based violence tears apart the very fabric of society, and inflicts lasting wounds on individuals and whole communities,” said Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg.

“Now is not the time to stand idly by. Now is the time for action,” she added.

Worldwide, more than one-third of all women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. While boys and men are also affected, the risk is much higher among women and girls and is particularly exacerbated in humanitarian crises.

In Nigeria, while the kidnapping of the Chibok school girls gripped international headlines in 2014, Boko Haram has and continues to kidnap women and girls for the purposes of sexual slavery and forced marriage. In this dated picture, Nigerians gathered at Unity Fountain, in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, on Apr. 30, 2014 to call on the country’s government to act quickly to find the 276 schoolgirls who were kidnapped from Chibok secondary school in northeast Borno state on Apr. 14 by Islamist extremist group Boko Haram. Credit: Mohammed Lere/IPS

In Nigeria, while the kidnapping of the Chibok school girls gripped international headlines in 2014, Boko Haram has and continues to kidnap women and girls for the purposes of sexual slavery and forced marriage. A report by the Henry Jackson Society found that Boko Haram members would forcefully impregnate women in order to produce the “next generation of fighters.”

Nadia Murad, who was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s Goodwill Ambassador, was among thousands of Yazidi women who were kidnapped by the Islamic State.

Many are forced to be sex slaves, and reports found that IS even uses social media sites such as Facebook to sell Yazidi women as sex slaves.

While Murad was able to escape, an estimated 3,000 Yazidi women and girls are still enslaved.

While women like Murad are leading the fight against SGBV and are often the first responders in a crisis, funding is woefully inadequate.

According to the International Rescue Committee, less than one percent of humanitarian aid is spent on combating gender-based violence in crises.

However, as communities lose access to basic services and needs such as shelter, healthcare, and income, financial support and provision of services is of the utmost importance.

In 2019, an estimated 140 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. Of these, approximately 35 million are women and girls of reproductive age.

Participants in ‘Ending Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Humanitarian Crises’ conference reiterated the importance of listening to survivors to help guide action.

“When I meet survivors I ask them what could have been done to prevent what happened to you, and they tell me things like a stove. In South Sudan, [they said] we have to go out of the protected civilian site to go fetch wood and that’s when we get raped,” said UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten.

In South Sudan, at least 175 women and girls experienced sexual and physical violence between September and December 2018 alone. Of these cases, 64 were girls, some as young as eight years old.

Researchers from the UN Mission in South Sudan and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, found that most of the victims were attacked on roads as they traveled in search of firewood, food or water, commodities which have been limited since the start of the conflict in 2013.

One woman recounted her experience after being raped on three separate occasions while walking to or from food distribution sites, stating: “We women do not have a choice…if we go by the main road, we are raped. If we go by the bush, we are raped…we avoided the road because we heard horrible stories that women and girls are grabbed while passing through and are raped, but the same happened to us. There is no escape—we are all raped.”

“We really need to listen to survivors. They have both a role to play in prevention and response,” Patten added, pointing to the need to address root causes of structural gender inequality and discrimination.

With regards to response, it is essential for survivors to receive health and psychosocial services as well as a safe space to heal, many said.

However, an increase in funding for SGBV prevention and response is sorely needed as well as support for local women’s organisations who are at the forefront of crisis response.

Recently, 350 Somali women leaders jointly called for zero tolerance for gender-based violence and the urgent passage of the Sexual Offences Bill which would be the country’s first dedicated SGBV-related legislation.

“We need to address the call for justice for survivors, we need to support women working closely with survivors,” said Somali Minister of Women and Human Rights Development Deqa Yasin Hagi Yusuf.

“We will return from this conference with even more energy to strengthen our legal and institutional framework to tackle SGBV,” she added.

The UN Population Fund’s Executive Director Natalia Kanem also stressed how crucial partnerships are and pledged to follow through with the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit’s commitment to provide 25 percent of funding to local and national responders by 2020.

“Support women and girls to rebuild their lives, to regain their dignity, and to feel safe and secure amidst crisis…Let the woman decide, let the girl decide,” Kanem said.

By the end of the conference, 21 donors committed 363 million dollars over the next two years.

“We are at a turning point. We have done something new, we thought out of the box, and I think we have all given something out of the ordinary. We all wanted this to work and we did,” said Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway Ine Eriksen Søreide in her closing remarks.

“I am absolutely confident we will be able to sustain this momentum…we have the majority, and we can make the changes…now the hard work starts,” she added.