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Death for the rapists!

To the gallows they shall go. Out comes the judgment against the beasts that raped a woman, weak and vulnerable, in front of her two little children, dumbstruck at the ordeal their defencelsss mother had to go through in the dead of the night on the motorway near Lahore. Abid Malhi and Shafqat Ali were sentenced to death, over the last weekend by a trial court, for sexually-assaulting the woman, a Pakistan-origin French national, on September 9, 2020. Judge Arshad Hussain Bhutta of the anti-terrorism court, also handed down life imprisonment and a fine of Rs50, 000 to each of the two brutes for related offences of abduction and robbery, respectively.

The conviction, coming within six months of the callous crime being committed, meets the expectations of all right-thinking people. But for a judge to deal with a rape case in a society as conservative and as confused as ours is not so simple, especially when it comes to deciding the case on the basis of forensic and circumstantial evidence ie with no eyewitnesses to testify in favour of the victim. Yes, the kind of pain and anger the horrific crime had evoked within the country and the embarrassment it had caused outside must have helped towards the case closure. But it is the capital punishment awarded to the two rapists that is significant, as it changes the way the judiciary has been dealing with cases involving rapes thus far. A bold deviation from the past, indeed!

The punishment with death – in what is now notorious as ‘motorway gangrape case’ – does set a very welcome precedent so very badly needed to fight violence and abuse against women that seem to be assuming epidemic proportions in our patriarchal society. The court judgment promises to encourage women to step out and report their sufferings at the hands of the opposite sex. To quote a few somber statistics, as many as 11 women are subjected to rape across the country on a daily basis. Of them only 41 per cent approach the police to register a case; and only 18 per cent of such cases reach the prosecution stage while the rate of conviction is shamefully low at 0.3 per cent, with death penalty nearly non-existent. No wonder Pakistan has, for years and years, been among the top five or six dangerous countries of the world for women to be in, according to multiple surveys.

While death for the rapists is welcome, the rape must also die. What’s needed towards this end is to adopt a multi-dimensional approach. Such an approach involves: 1) bringing legislation to do away with the obstacles that discourage women from putting their sufferings on record; 2) carrying out a radical overhaul of the criminal justice system to ensure that the culprits are nabbed and punished, besides focusing on sensitising police, prosecutors, magistrates, judges and medico-legal staff to issues concerning women; 3) devising special programmes for women empowerment; 4) creating enabling environment for women at educational institutions, workplaces and other areas; and 5) taking steps to bring about change in societal mindset, like using curriculum to educate students from the very beginning on the respect that the fair sex deserves, carrying out awareness campaigns through media on the to-dos for women in case of an untoward happening, etc.

The motorway gangrape case must jolt us all into meaningful action aimed at taking our country among the world’s best for women to be in.

Newspaper: Express Tribune (Editorial)