Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Sep 12: Nation-wide protests have broken out in Pakistan over a top police officer blaming the victim of a gang rape for travelling on the highways late in the night without being accompanied by a male escort forcing the prime minister Imran Khan to promise quickest possible actions against the perpetrators of the crime.
The demand for immediate resignation of the Lahore police chief Umar Sheikh had been voiced all over the country including the opposition parties for his “unacceptable” comments blaming the victim instead of assuring immediate action against the culprits. Though 15 people had been arrested in this connection, but the police admitted that none of them were involved in the gang rape.
After facing widespread criticism for the lack of security on the freshly constructed Lahore-Sialkot Motorway, Punjab Inspector General of Police Inam Ghani deployed highway patrol and special protection personnel to man the highway on Friday, reports reaching here said.
According to various agency reports, the incident occurred on Thursday when the woman, a Pakistani national but currently a resident of France, was attacked during the early hours after her car broke down on the Lahore-Sialkot highway while she was driving from Lahore to Gujranwala with her two children. In her statement to the police, the woman said she was waiting for help to arrive when a group of men smashed her window, dragged her out of the car and raped her in front of her children in a nearby field.
Her assailants then fled the scene, taking her jewellery, cash and three ATM cards with them. Hundreds took to the streets on Friday after the Lahore police chief, the lead investigator of the case, rebuked the woman for driving down the motorway late at night without a man accompanying her. Sheikh also commented that no one in Pakistani society would “allow their sisters and daughters to travel alone so late. Since the victim is a resident of France, she must have mistaken that Pakistani society is just as safe.”
His comments were widely condemned and sparked demands for his immediate resignation. Pakistan’s Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari called his remarks “unacceptable” and said, “Nothing can ever rationalise the crime of rape.”
For an officer to effectively blame a woman for being gang raped by saying “she should have taken the GT Road or question as to why she went out in the night with her children is unacceptable & have taken up this issue,” Mazari tweeted.
Lawyer and women’s rights activist Khadija Siddiqi said Sheikh’s response to the case was an unfortunate manifestation of the “very rampant” culture of “victim blaming in the country.” Pakistan’s main opposition party PML-N, too, called for Sheikh’s resignation while the opposition Jamaat-i-Islami chief Senator Sirajul Haq gave the government a 48-hour ultimatum to produce the culprits.
Condemning the brutal attack, Imran Khan wrote in a statement on Twitter that he was closely following the case and had directed the investigators to arrest and sentence those involved in the incident “as soon as possible.” He assured the people that his government would work towards strengthening laws to address the threat posed by a surge in rape cases involving women and children in recent years.
Earlier this year, Pakistani lawmakers had passed a bill, which called for the public hanging of all those convicted of the sexual abuse and murder of children.
