Pakistan
Jeffrey Coolidge / Photodisc / Getty
It's so sad that it's actually news when parents refuse to murder their daughter, or allow their daughter to be murdered by others, simply because she was the victim of gang rape. But that's the depths to which Pakistani society has sunk. Kainat Soomro was gang raped when she was just 13 years old and for that, "respected" religious and social leaders in her home town of Mehar decided she should be killed. Her family refused and are now in hiding.
According to the Kainat family's account, the tribal elders declared her kari, (which literally means black female), for losing her virginity outside marriage. In Pakistan, women and men who have illicit relationships or women who lose their virginity before marriage are at risk of paying with their lives.
"These are matters of honor and the leaders call a jirga and they declare that the woman or the couple should be killed," said Abdul Hai, a veteran field officer for the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. These acts of violence are most commonly labeled as "honor killings." ...
Kainat said that despite the pressures her family refused to kill her. "It is the tradition, but if the family doesn't permit it, then it won't happen. My father, my brother, my mom didn't allow it," she said.
And that defiance has left the family fearing for their lives. The family's new home in Karachi has been attacked a number of times. ...In Karachi, Kainat and her family are now sharing one room in a run-down apartment block, and they have to rely on charities to help them pay for food. "We go hungry many nights," said Kainat's older sister.
Source: The Atlantic
The overall situation in Pakistan right now is absolutely horrible. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has reported that in 2009, around 46% of all women who were murdered in Pakistan were killed in the name of "honor." And that number is probably way too low because it only counts incidents that have been designated as "murder." It can't count all the times women were murdered by relatives and neighbors in incidents that were labeled suicides or accidents.
Even worse, some of these cases involve situations where the women were already victimized somehow, like Kainat Soomro. She faces a death penalty for being a victim but the men who raped her don't face any sort of punishment whatsoever, never mind something as harsh as what Soomro faces.
Unfortunately, the prospects for Kainat Soomro to see justice done are small at best. A judge has already ruled against her because she has no evidence. This is society where even the lives of women have little value, so how do you think they treat the testimony of a woman? Perhaps there would have been corroborating evidence if she had been tested for rape at the time, but Pakistani police don't believe women who claim to have been raped and don't bother testing them.
These sorts of things should only be limited to humanity's ancient, barbaric history -- a history that we have to accept as having been part of us, but which we sensibly reject today. But it's not just part of the past, is it? There are actually places like Pakistan which treat such barbarism like it were a good and proper way to live. And why? It basically comes back to religion -- without the justifications provided by Islam, it would be very difficult for a culture to keep something like this going. Not impossible, perhaps, but a lot more difficult.
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