(Image via nbcnews.com)

Staff Writer: Gwen Pichette

Email: gpichette@umassd.edu

Trigger warning: Discussion of sexual assault

Chaos erupted across schools in the province of Punjab, where student protesters were tear-gassed, restrained, and arrested after on-campus protests turned violent.

What are students protesting that could cause such unrest? An alleged on-campus rape.

The assault of a female student was reported to have occurred in the eastern city of Lahore, but protests have broken out across four different cities in the area. Protestors reportedly ransacked college buildings, burned furniture, and blocked traffic before police responded by beating them with batons and tear-gassing them. 

Over 250 students were arrested, and one security guard was killed in a skirmish between protesters and police officers.

Such protests have prompted the government to shut down schools and universities for a few days across the Punjab province in an attempt to let the chaos settle down—a decision that is affecting an estimated 18 million students. 

However, to many, this is not an issue to simply let settle down.

Sexual violence against women is extremely common in Pakistan but is underreported because of how stigmatized it is in a notoriously conservative country. This also means that protests about it are extraordinarily rare.

The Sustainable Social Development Organization (SSDO) reported back in September that there were 7,010 rape cases reported in Pakistan in 2023. On average, 19 women were raped a day, and almost 95% of them occurred in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province.

Even more alarming, the SSDO said that the already staggeringly high amount of rape cases is most likely far larger. “Due to social stigmas in Pakistan that discourage women from getting help, there is a high chance that due to underreporting, the actual number of cases may be even higher,” the SSDO stated.

The reality is that rape is often not simply ignored and swept under the rug. The brutality of the crime is minimized, and the victims are also shamed for being assaulted. 

This issue came to light after a woman in the southern Sindh province reported being gang-raped by three men during a polio vaccination drive-in. While the three men were arrested, the woman was thrown out of her house by her husband because he claimed that she had ruined the family’s reputation.

She is just one of many who are shedding light on the stigmatization of sexual violence against women.

The woman who was allegedly raped on campus is also being disbelieved after a committee was constituted by Pakistan’s Punjab Government to investigate the rape and concluded that no such incident occurred. The high-level committee was made up of seven members and was headed by Chief Secretary Zahid Akhtar Zaman.

The report alleged that the rape was “fabricated and spread via fake social media accounts to create unrest and a law and order situation” and involved “malicious actors with vested interest who exploited the situation to advance their political agenda.” 

The Federal Investigation Agency already has 36 registered cases against people who are accused of spreading harmful misinformation about the rape case via social media. Adding onto this, the alleged victim’s parents deny that the rape occurred.

However, due to Pakistan’s culture of sexual violence, many are reluctant to believe such reports of fabrication to be true. One such person is Mauz Ullah, a student who attends the same college as the woman who fell victim to the sexual assault.

He does not believe the school or the police because “they kept changing their position” on the assault and because the college initially denied it entirely. “If no such incident had taken place, then why did they arrest a guard?” he asked. 

These dismissals of the assault have also been the catalyst for a larger conversation about the Pakistan rape crisis, something that one source from Tribune Magazine even declared to be “a national emergency.” 

That same source claims that even if this claim of assault is somehow fabricated, it “is emblematic of a deeper, pervasive problem” in a country that has “systemic flaws in law enforcement, a cultural obsession with women’s ‘honour’ and ‘purity’, and woefully low conviction rates have fostered an archaic social system.”

See the infographic about Pakistan’s rape cycle below. 

The systemic flaws in law enforcement that are being referred to is that while rape cases remain high, convictions for them are low. The annual number of rape cases in India has averaged to be around a whopping 30,000, and yet the conviction rate remains concerningly low, 27% to 28%.

This is something that many fear will happen in this most recent case. But to some, it is all too familiar. 

One such person is former Lahore High Court Judge Nasir who warns about the trajectory that this most recent injustice could go. “It is essential not just for the government but also for civil society to play its part in curtailing sex crimes. Pakistan has strict laws against sexual violence, but the real issue lies in their implementation. If anyone raises their voice against such incidents, attempts are made to silence them,” she lamented.

When asked about why they were doing the protests, student Mauz Ullah repeated a sentiment that many other students echoed: they wanted to “seek justice for her.”