‘If a woman is killed, they say she fell, she took poison’: Pakistan’s devastating rise in ‘hidden’ sexual violence

A white-bearded man looks straight into the camera, in the video circulating for the past few weeks on social media. “I killed my wife,” he says calmly in Urdu. “We have a give-and-take arrangement and when she refused to give, I said I would take.”

Hours earlier, the 64-year-old had walked into a police station in Karachi’s Orangi neighbourhood and confessed to murdering Asma Begum, a 58-year-old mother of four, in the home they shared because she had refused him sex.

Face of an older man with white hair, beard and glasses.

The next day, a lift operator at Quetta’s government-run Civil hospital threw acid on a 29-year-old doctor, Mahnoor Nasir, when she opened her door. The suspect was later killed during police efforts to detain him as he allegedly tried to flee the city. Nasir, who sustained burns to 35% of her body, was airlifted to Karachi for treatment.

Two days later, on 7 June, an unconscious 17-year-old girl in Jhang, Punjab, was dumped at a hospital by three men. Police arrested suspects using CCTV footage from the hospital. They said the girl had been kidnapped, drugged and gang-raped. She later died.

Also in June, shortly before dying from complications related to multiple abortions, an 18-year-old housemaid told police in Lahore that she had been repeatedly raped by her employer’s son and his driver.

“The severity of violence has gone through the roof,” says Dr Summaiya Syed-Tariq, the chief police surgeon in Pakistan’s Sindh provincial health department, who has spent 26 years documenting violence in Karachi’s medico-legal system.

“As a society, our tolerance and acceptability towards violence have increased manifold. These cases are just the tip of the iceberg,” Tariq says.

Describing Karachi as a “petri dish” of crime because it is such a melting pot of people and ethnicities, Tariq says the city reflects many forms of violence experienced by Pakistan’s women, which is often concealed, misreported or never reported at all.

“If the woman has been killed in the process, they will say, she fell, she took poison, she burnt herself, or she committed suicide. In the last case, they often stage the entire event by hanging a flimsy scarf from a ceiling fan.”

Tariq says that along with providing vague information, families’ refusal to allow a postmortem examination remains one of the biggest hurdles. “There is such a hue and cry, although it is against the law,” she says, adding: “It’s because they don’t want us to confirm what we already suspect.”

The scale of such hidden violence, Tariq says, underscores the need for better documentation: “We need to count these women in order to formulate policies to protect them.”

She is working to set up a femicide observatory, which will be the first organisation in Pakistan – and perhaps South Asia – to monitor the premeditated killing of women.

People march down a street holding placards. One in English reads ‘stop acid attack’.

The reluctance to believe survivors is especially acute in cases of marital rape, one of the least-reported forms of violence. “We only come to know [about such cases] if the woman is brought to the hospital in critical condition,” says Tariq.

Nobody believes the victim; not the doctors, not the police and often not even the courts, she says. “After finding the courage to speak out and crossing so many barriers, if she still receives no help, it is no surprise that such crimes go unreported. By the time the situation reaches a crisis point, it is too late,” Tariq says.

One case from last year continues to haunt the doctor. Recalling the sexual violence inflicted on a woman just two days after her marriage, she says the victim’s brother, who filed the complaint, alleged that the husband had inserted a metal pipe and his hand into her anus and threatened to kill her if she spoke about it. Despite knowing she was bleeding, her in-laws concealed her condition and did not seek medical assistance.

Her experience with such cases, Tariq says, has shown her that many men do not see women as human beings, but as objects. “It baffles me no end – even if there is little love, where is the companionship and friendship?”

In the Orangi case, Tariq says the violence inflicted on the wife had been “extreme” all because she had refused to have sex with her husband.

Disturbingly, social media was flooded with videos of men – including lawyers – praising the husband for killing his wife over her “disobedience”, with some legal professionals publicly offering to represent him.

Tariq is not surprised. “I have met mothers-in-law who insist their sons were right to put the fear of God into their wives. They cannot comprehend a wife saying no, and they invoke religion to justify it. The common refrain is that angels would otherwise send their laanat [curse] upon her.”

For Tariq, such attitudes are symptoms of a much deeper societal malaise. “We must get to the root causes of violence,” she says. “It is not a leak that you can plug; it is a systems failure.”

She believes that the growing normalisation of aggression is evident not only in the crimes she investigates, but also in everyday interactions. “I witness it every day, not just in my office but outside as well,” she says.

A protest against domestic violence in Hyderabad, 2022.

“I am an animal lover, so it angers me to see how casually people mistreat animals. My apartment overlooks a park, and every evening I watch boys returning from a nearby madrasa. Along the way, they throw stones at stray dogs or hit one another – sometimes with slippers – as a form of play. The swings in the park are all broken, mostly by older children who have vandalised them through misuse.”

Tariq says that it is perhaps unsurprising therefore that survivors who do come forward often encounter scepticism. And these women, she says, are not confined to certain sections of society. “It is a myth I’d like to dispel,” she says. “There is no ‘certain’ kind.

“Just as violence takes has many shades and forms, the women who experience it come from every social class and background.”

After decades of listening to survivors, Tariq says their most urgent need may not always be medical care or legal aid, but something far more basic: “Simply someone to believe her.”

The Guardian wp:paragraph