By IANS,
Islamabad : The assault on 10 women in Pakistan’s Punjab province, with one being stripped naked and paraded through a village, is due to “misogynistic attitudes to women, an assumption by men that they can sexually harass women with impunity”, a daily said Wednesday.
An editorial in the News International said that in Missan Kot Buaa in Muzzaffaragarh, 10 women of a single household were assaulted and one of them stripped naked and paraded around the village.
“It is impossible to imagine the sense of pain and degradation that all these women felt, a pain exacerbated by the fact that none of them was personally responsible for or involved in the incident that led to their public disgrace,” it said.
They were attacked after the son-in-law of one of the women was accused of kidnapping a married woman.
“…it is clear that at the root lie misogynistic attitudes to women, an assumption by men that they can sexually harass women with impunity, and the primitive belief that a man’s ‘honour’ is somehow resident in the female body and that to strike at the man one strikes at the woman,” the editorial said.
The daily took exception to “a national tendency in agencies of law-and-order to turn a blind eye to what they regard as ‘family matters’ – and this includes murder, abduction, rape and incest – and leave things alone for the family to sort out among themselves according to whatever the local custom and practice may be”.
“For many men, women are part of their portable property, mere chattels to do with as they will. They may be repositories of male honour – but women experience that in the breach rather than the observance. The shame inflicted on these innocent women is a shame we all share – but need to feel more keenly for anything to change,” it added.
Pakistan has an estimated population of 180 million, half of whom are women.