I was walking home from my school and I went to the store to buy a toy for my niece,” 17-year-old Kainat Soomro says, her face impassive on camera. “While I was looking at things, a guy pressed a handkerchief on my nose. I fainted and was kidnapped. Then four men gangraped me.”
In Pakistan, one of the most unsafe countries for women, Kainat has become the symbol of a woman fighting for justice. Justice for a gangrape that happened to her four years ago in Mehar, a small town in Pakistan. Kainat was held captive for three days. She finally escaped, and when her father tried to get the rapists arrested, the police refused to investigate. In a grim irony, the tribal elders declared her kari (black female), for losing her virginity outside marriage. Kainat’s case and of others like her are part of a pathbreaking documentary ‘Outlawed in Pakistan’ by Pulitzer Center journalists Habiba Nosheen, a Pakistani-Canadian who lives and works in New York, and Hilke Schellmann, a video journalist for The Wall Street Journal.
By choosing to fight back, Kainat has become the figurehead of women’s rights in a country where cases of rape have risen dramatically in the past decade. In a recent interview she said, “I want justice, I will not stop until I get justice.” In Pakistan, especially the tribal areas in Punjab and AfPak, the lives of men and women who have independent relationships or women who lose their virginity before marriage are always in danger.
According to Pakistan newspaper The Nation, 110 of total 271 women and 358 of 2,427 women became victims of gangrape and rape in the Lahore region. Of the 2,184 women raped, Bahawalpur region recorded 496 incidents. This shows rape increased by 12.5 and 13.5 per cent during the first 11 months of 2010 compared to the corresponding period of 2009. About 271 incidents of gangrape were registered in 35 districts of the Punjab in 2010 — 13 per cent higher than in 2009 in which only 136 incidents had occurred. Forty-nine gangrape cases were registered in Lahore, 30 in Sheikhupura, 25 in Kasur, 16 in Gujranwala, 11 each in Rawalpindi and Faisalabad. The provincial police, however, have arrested only 385 rapists out of 643. Forty-eight cases of gangrape are still under investigation. About 125 challans were sent in the courts and the Punjab police cancelled 47 cases besides furnishing different pleas; a trend Kainat is only too painfully aware of.
“These are matters of honour and the leaders call a jirga (local tribal assembly) and they declare that the woman or the couple should be killed,” Nosheen quotes Abdul Hai, a veteran field officer for the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. In many parts of Pakistan today, women are treated as male property, personifying a bizarre sense of family honour. Jirgas often denounce a woman, who has married of her own free will or is rumoured to have acted in a “dishonourable” fashion, a kari. Tribal law insists the family or the tribe must kill these women to restore their honour.
The most recent report from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan noted that in 2009, roughly 46 per cent of all female murders in the country were in the name of “honour”. The Pakistani press reported 647 “honour killings”. However, experts say that the actual number is much higher but never reach the courts since families and the police pass them off as suicides. Over 70 per cent of the murdered victims are women and only 30 per cent of victims of honour killings are men. Around the Islamic world, the United Nation Population Fund estimates that about 5,000 honour killings happen every year, and experts say this phenomenon is on the rise in Pakistan. Kainat is proud that her family stood up to the elders and refused to kill her. “It is the tradition, but if the family doesn’t permit it, then it won’t happen. My father, my brother, my mom didn’t allow it,” she said in an interview. But that stand forced Kainat’s family to flee their ancestral home for the safety of Karachi. But her shame followed her to the city too; her house has been attacked a number of times. Kainat and her family live in a one-room apartment, and they have to rely on charity for food.
But she may be fighting a losing battle. A local judge has already ruled against Kainat in the case. The judgment said, “There is no corroborative evidence available on record. The sole testimony of the alleged rape survivor is not sufficient.” The police in Pakistan rarely collect material evidence in a rape case since the victims are not welcome at police stations. In Kainat’s case, too, there was no medical evidence testifying to rape. The local court ruling has made Kainat only more determined. “I am not giving up, I will take this all the way to the Supreme Court of Pakistan,” she said in an interview.
Aisha Afzal is luckier than Kainat. She loved a man, in defiance of her family’s wishes. They married, and the couple were kidnapped by her family and tortured. They managed to escape and Aisha took refuge in ‘Panah’, a shelter for women who are in danger of being killed for “honour”; her husband lived in a small rental nearby. Panah is a neat large building located in a middle-class neighbourhood in Karachi. The shelter’s gates are protected by armed security guards at all times. It was founded by Majida Razvi, a retired female judge. Her one worry is that the women arrive there by court order which means they can’t leave the premises without court permission either. Aisha’s husband is fighting a case in courts against Aisha’s family’s allegation that he had kidnapped her. The women can stay in the shelter only for six months and Aisha is worried of her brother and sister who have threatened to kill her for besmirching her family’s “honour”.
The difference between ‘Outlawed in Pakistan’ and other documentaries on honour killings is that it tells the story of two women who are still alive and are willing to speak out. In video diaries and verité-style scenes, they tell their stories in the first-person — of horrific abuse and their heroic escapes. Both Habiba Nosheen and Hilke Schellmann are graduates from Columbia School of
Journalism. ‘Outlawed in Pakistan’ is not their first documentary together; in 2009, Habiba and Hilke produced a half-hour award winning special on surrogacy.