Sexually violated women in Pakistan are not only denied justice but also made to bear all the consequences of the same crime, thanks to society's strange attitude, the law, the media, government, and what not.
In Pakistan, heinous crime like Rape gets glossed over with pretty, romantic words. Over the years, Pakistani Dailies (English and Urdu) have described RAPE as incidents of ‘eve-teasing’. When I was younger, I used to like that phrase; it has a charm and an air of linguistic vestige of moderate thinkers of colonial rule in the subcontinent; but, in reality, it is blatant oppression or harassment of Muslim women. I mistakenly used to think that this stiff-upper-lip, eyes-politely-averted, use of ‘eve-teasing’ to describe such criminal incidents was a civilized effort to protect women through language, to keep things decent and manageable in an Islam-dominated society.
Nevertheless, let us be honest that ‘eve-teasing’ is a charming way of describing blatant sexual harassments. And, rather than protecting women, it only softens the stark reality that everyday Muslim women, who dare to come out on the streets of this country, PAKISTAN (Land of the Pure!), are subjected to blatant sexual offences by Muslim men that would be punishable by jail-terms in most western countries.
Which brings me to the latest linguistic juggernaut, plaguing Pakistani women. Has anyone else ever noticed in recent headlines about a ‘freewill couple’? Freewill opposed to what? Arranged? Coerced? Convenient? In a country, where majority of the women do not have the legal right to marry a man of her choice without the consent of her wali (guardian)—that is, on her own free will—shouldn’t our language reflect the realities that a so-called ‘freewill’ couple are a state-sanctioned reality? Should not our language, in light of legal precedents, try to acknowledge that ‘freewill’ matrimony is a normal state of affairs?
I am fully aware of the reality that most Muslim women in this country have very little ‘say’ about whom they marry, and that ‘freewill’ couples remain exceptions. Nevertheless, by coining a strange adjective—‘freewill couple’—to describe Muslim couples that choose to make their own decisions and destiny, the media only highlight how anomalous, exceptional, and unfortunate these cases are. Our language, in defiance of our laws, continues to make Muslim marriages in which men and women choose their marriage-partners, somehow, is very remarkable, and an undesirable!
Why not refer to the so-called ‘freewill couples’ simply as ‘couples’, and begin describing people, who had no say in their marital arrangements, as ‘arranged couples’ or ‘coerced couples’? By that way, the reality that people are married off against their own free will may begin to seem odd, or socially divergent, or outcasts of society. The fact is, a shift in language, which is the first step toward a change in social attitudes based on religious beliefs, and, ultimately, behavioral religious inbreeding.
In Pakistan, women are particularly shortchanged by the words that government officials, lawyers and journalists use in the most obvious instances. The patriarchal legal language has let Pakistani women down by continuing to refer to rapes and gang-rapes as zina-bil-jabr (consensual sex between unmarried couple). This legal snafu is regularly exploited by Muslim men, who insist that women are eternally tempted to sexual intercourse, and that men would never actually rape anyone. As for the Mullahs, zina-bil-jabr is hence brought upon a woman, who has exploited her skin to the mazloom-meen (innocent Muslim men). If the raped woman in question had veiled herself from the devil’s eye of seduction, she could have saved herself from this rightful punishment by Allah.
In reality, the jaded authorities turn a blind eye to such victims and compel them not to report such blatant violations of their dignity by coloring the victim as a lucid seductress, who has brought this upon herself through her own evil deeds. Hence, she is the ultimate progenitor of the crime that tricked the Muslim man into committing the rape.
Police surgeons, investigating medico-legal issues in rape-cases have repeatedly failed to generate concrete evidence against sex-offenders that might facilitate their prosecution. Throughout Pakistan, and in Karachi in particular, there are only eight female medico-legal officers serving to a mega city, where some 1.5 million women live. It is unnecessary to explain how this handful of women is supposed to ensure that all cases of potential rapes in this sex-crime-ridden society should properly be examined for justice to be rendered.
Just so, we are clear, the Karachi police surgeon, the man overseeing all legal medical examinations that could have a bearing in criminal cases of reported rape, refer to raped and gang-raped women as the victim of their own sexual perverseness and urges, thus, clearing male-offenders of any wrongdoing. Even worse, the onus of the heinous crime is put upon the female victims; despite being violated and abused, the surgeon’s description would imply that the female-victim had done something, which they should be ashamed of, and, of course, must bear all consequences.
Sadly, in this male-dominated society, euphemistic language is the norm, not exception. Both public and the media in Pakistan have the terrible habit of using awkward words and phrases that implicitly rob women of their basic human rights. The fact is, language has power, and the way they choose to describe or imply an event indicates a social attitude, and beyond that, a legal perspective or a national stance. That is why it does matter whether you use the n-word in a post-Civil-Rights-Movement America. And that, why do people object to the use of antiseptic terms, such as ‘ethnic cleansing’, when, in reality, a genocide or mass-murder campaign is underway by Muslims. The use of romanticized or sugar-coated terms to describe crimes only emboldens the offender and betray the basic civil rights and freedom of the victim, and protection from criminals, who rape children as young as 6-month-old babies.
‘Eves’ are not being ‘teased’; there is nothing flirtatious or innocent about men fondling women on buses, yelling obscenities toward college-girls crossing the street, or even groping them outside schools or at parks of Pakistan. If, for all those years, papers had rightly referred to such incidents as acts of sexual harassments, then enough public outrage might have generated to force law-authorities to adopt a stronger stance against it.
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