But his statement had achieved its desired result: it hinted to his legions of supporters that the onus is on women to prevent sexual harassment. I mean, it’s common sense.” The statement was widely criticized, and Khan made several attempts, including in this magazine, to establish that his words had been taken out of context. it has consequences in the society.” Swan asked whether he believed that what women wear is part of the “temptation,” and the then Prime Minister replied, “If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the man unless they are robots. Take the example of Imran Khan, who, when asked by Jonathan Swan, in 2021, about the epidemic of rape and sexual violence in Pakistan, responded, “If you raise temptation in the society . . . But to be a woman in Pakistan is to have a slew of alternative facts thrown one’s way, all day, every day-on TV, in sermons, at banks, on the road, in the privacy of one’s bedroom. Seven-year-old Zainab Ansari-victim of one of the most henious cases of rape and murder in Pakistan-was fully clothed as she was led away by her rapist. It is to encounter the cultural assumption that sexual assault can be prevented by dressing and behaving “modestly,” no matter that CCTV footage of busy streets in Pakistani cities routinely shows women in burqas being harassed. As I twisted my body away from him, he melted into the crowd.Īre you tempted to ask what I was wearing each time I was harassed? To be a woman in Pakistan is to encounter this question and its subtext everywhere we go. At twenty-five, again in Lahore, in Liberty Market, I was groped by a man-he grabbed my left breast-as he handed out flyers for fried chicken. The collective horror of it-almost everyone in our group of eight assaulted-is something we talk about to this day. Most of my friends were groped that night. We were in a throng there were hundreds of us. When I was fourteen, a man groped me between the legs at a Stereo Nation concert in Lahore. She pursed her lips and told me not to speak of the incident to anyone. Days later, I confided in my grandmother. As he crept close to me, penis in fist, I scrambled off the van and sprinted into my aunt’s furniture store in Raja Center. What amazes me is that he did this in one of the most crowded places in the city. I was sitting in the back of my aunt’s open-cabin van. When I was ten years old, a man undid his pants in front of me and began masturbating, in a busy alley in Lahore’s Main Market.
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