Leaders are supposed to set examples, not just on the political but also the social front. However, Prime Minister Imran Khan apparently does not understand such a concept. Earlier this week, during a live television show, the Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan, “blamed a rise in rape cases on how women dressed, remarks that activists denounced as perpetuating a culture of victim blaming.”
As the New York Times reported “before he became prime minister, Mr. Khan was a cricket star and A-list celebrity who cut a glamorous figure and was known as a ladies’ man. He married Ms. Goldsmith in 1995, and they divorced in 2004. But he became increasingly conservative in the mid-1990s after he entered politics, and has been accused of being overly sympathetic to the Taliban in recent years.”
In his interview Khan said, “What is the concept of purdah? It is to stop temptation. Not every man has willpower. If you keep on increasing vulgarity, it will have consequences.”
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent group, immediately issued a statement demoing that Khan “apologize for his remarks, which it called unacceptable behavior on the part of a public leader. Not only does this betray a baffling ignorance of where, why, and how rape occurs, but it also lays the blame on rape survivors.”
According to activists “There are few reliable statistics on rape in Pakistan, but rights activists say it is a severely underreported crime, in part because victims are often treated as criminals or blamed for the assaults. Thousands of protesters took to the streets last year after a top police official in the eastern city of Lahore said that a woman who was raped on a deserted highway was partly to blame for the attack.”
As former editor of Dawn, Abbas Nasir, wrote in a column, “Men need to be educated and then read the riot act. The enforcement of the law must be merciless in such cases. We aspire to create a society modelled on the most ideal city state of the past and our imagination runs out at just telling women and children to embrace ‘modesty and purdah’ to protect themselves from violent predators. Wow.”
