Extrajudicial measures

Whenever there is an incident of sexual assault or gender-based violence in Pakistan, we often end up with two tragedies for the price of one. First, there is the crime itself. Time and again, mostly, women who have the temerity to walk around in parks, go to work, school or just literally step out of their homes fall prey to the most brutal form of victimization imaginable. We are reminded, in the unlikely event that some of us had forgotten, that a woman by herself in public minding her own business is in enemy territory. This enemy territory can come in a myriad of seemingly innocuous forms: a motorway, an office, a dormitory and, as with the recent incident in Islamabad, a public park. In the aftermath comes the second tragedy. This tends to take the form of victim-blaming, the survivor/victim’s name and identity being leaked by a scandal-hungry media that plays to our people’s worst attitudes and miscarriage of justice. Mercifully, there was not much of the first in the wake of the F9 Park incident, at least not from the authorities or the general public as was the case in the Lahore Motorway case, for example. The perpetrators fulfilled that role this time around, having had the infuriating audacity to berate the young woman for being out in a park at night while raping her at gunpoint.

Unfortunately, however, the F9 Park case had plenty of the other two. Some media organizations ended up leaking the victim’s name and Pemra, keeping to our authorities’ time-honoured tradition of taking a mistake and resolving to top it, saw fit to issue a blanket ban on any further reporting of the incident. This held until the perpetrators were revealed to have been shot dead by the Islamabad police. And now we come to the miscarriage of justice. According to the capital police, the perpetrators were gunned down after they opened fire at a police checkpoint; reportedly they were also wanted by the authorities in a host of other crimes including murder.

For many, this would have been justice well-served. Whether it is a lynch mob, an ‘encounter’ or a state-sanctioned execution, anything that ends with the villains dead before their time serves as justice in a country where courts and laws carry little weight and even less public-confidence. The more grisly the end, the better. Proponents dub this ‘speedy justice’ and deem it preferable to cumbersome nuisances like legal precedent, the rights of the accused, proportional punishment, human rights and burden-of-proof. Contrary to this sentiment, the F9 Park victim’s lawyer has said that her client was called in to identify the two perpetrators, who she says the police had taken into custody. Upon confirming their identities, the victim was called in again to do the same, but this time her tormentors were dead. Pakistan’s civil society and rights activists have over the years consistently been saying that the police wash away any possibility of justice by the judicial system when such incidents take place. Our resort to the bluntest of tools is poor compensation for a broken legal system. It is the latter that we must fix if there is ever to be law and order. Or else, we will keep reliving the trauma of seeing extrajudicial measures being employed to remedy injustice.