File photo of the F-9 Park in Islamabad
Two armed men gang-raped a young woman at Islamabad’s F-9 Park last week, shocking Pakistanis over the brazenness of the crime occurring in the midst of the federal capital. In the FIR registered with Islamabad Police, the victim says she was walking in the park with a male companion when the assailants approached them; separated them at gunpoint; and then raped her in a nearby thicket. While police have issued a sketch of the primary accused, there has thus far been little progress in locating and apprehending either culprit.
Predictably, amidst the outrage and calls for justice, is a growing chorus demanding explanations for why the woman was walking in the park at night, and what she was doing with her male friend, i.e. victim-blaming. This is, sadly, not a new occurrence for conservative Pakistan. Similar discourse resulted from the gang-rape of a woman in front of her children on the Lahore-Sialkot motorway in 2020, with the cop tasked with investigating it going so far as to blame the victim for the route she had taken while returning to her home in Gujranwala.
Activists have noted that many victims of sexual assault in Pakistan avoid reporting the crime because they fear backlash from within their own families, as well as invasive, irrelevant questioning from investigators. A recent Supreme Court ruling sought to quell this, noting a victim’s personal history had no bearing on their fundamental right to security, and condemning investigators who focus more on what a woman was wearing, or what she was doing, rather than the actions of criminals who targeted them.
Unfortunately, the patriarchal and conservative mindset prevalent in Pakistan is more comfortable with restricting women from public spaces rather than questioning the societal mores that condition men to regard women as “lesser beings” who can be “punished” for perceived excesses through assault and rape. This was abundantly clear in the F-9 Park incident, with the victim narrating that one of the men had told her she should not “walk in the park at night”—after they had raped her. The hypocrisy of this statement harkens back to tribal councils, where “elders” treat women as little more than objects, ordering their rape and abuse to “punish” men of their families. The most infamous example of this is the case of Mukhtaran Mai, who was gang-raped in 2002 on the orders of panchayat. Despite trial courts convicting her assailants, the superior judiciary subsequently overturned the verdict, acquitting all but one of the rapists.
It must be clear to all that rape is not a sexual act, but an act of violence. Blaming women for not wearing the right clothes or for utilizing public spaces is not a solution; its repression. If we truly serious about countering such crimes, it is well past time for Pakistan to teach its men—and not its women—how to behave in public.