Pakistan's taboo on sex abuse

[emad]

Nadia Asjad
BBC reporter, Islamabad



Rape victim Irshad Bibi - few women dare to speak out

A group of Lahore women factory workers complain they are greeted each morning by their bus driver unzipping his trousers.

A university student in Islamabad, Saira, recalls one of her professors: "He would pat our backs, touch our hands whenever possible and stare at us suggestively."

And a woman from Pakistan's most conservative region, North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), discovers that her husband molested her son's wife: "When we all protested, he divorced me and threw me out of his house," she said.

Ranging from "Eve teasing" - as sexual taunting is often referred to in South Asia - to disturbing numbers of gang rapes, sexual harassment is affecting women in villages and cities alike.
More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4017441.stm

[sui generis]

1. I was in Pakistan for a while in Karachi for work

Women are VERY deferential, rarely hold any position of authority and are treated as "property".

The culture there (derived from ancient tribal customs that likely predated Islam) is based on a complex kinship system. If you are a man, when you marry a woman, you owe more allegiance to her brothers than to your own natural sister. Daughters, with required doweries, are seen as a liability unless they can marry into an influential clan. A daughter who is not "pure" (virgin) can never be married and is not only a waste of resources, but a source of shame.

Even grave markers sometimes only list the man's name, "and wife" -- although we did that here too clear through the 19th century.

It's a different culture, and it's self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. Certainly it is absolutely utterly impossible to enforce western standards of human decency into a culture that has thousands of years of entrenchment, and I am also talking about Iraq here.

It has to either evolve on its own or not at all.