Over the past 10 days, Pakistan’s conscious was set ablaze and shaken up when a picture of seven-year-old Zainab’s dead body went viral on the internet. The minor girl from Kasur had been raped, murdered and then thrown in a heap of garbage. Yes, that is the reality of many countless girls (and boys) in this country. Kasur has already been under the spotlight previously for birthing and remaining the largest child pornography hub in the nation, supplying illegal child porn worldwide, making those very videos by continuously raping young boys and girls.
The one positive thing that we all have seen as a result of Zainab’s unfortunate experience was that the Pakistani public has started to speak out more openly about rape and sexual abuse; there have been several calls from celebrities even to provincial governments that they chow down and punish the perpetrator of this heinous crime in a way that would scare off any potential rapists in the future to commit similar crimes. Regrettably, however, Zainab’s case isn’t the first one of its kind and nor is it the last one. By now, we know that rape cases are quite prevalent in Pakistan, majority of them are not reported and some that make it to social media gain attention that really should be given and dedicated to every single case of this sort. But, it doesn’t.
In the midst of all this chaos, many people found the courage to talk about their personal experiences of sexual abuse. One such case that gained much attention was a tweet from a doctor, Fatima Sheerin, who shared a story of a patient who had died on her wedding night because her husband had used iron bars to rape her. She had succumbed to severe internal injuries that the newly wedded girl bled to death. Since sex is such a taboo subject in most households in Pakistan and there is no concept of sex education in schools, a lot of the Pakistani people grow up having no knowledge about it. Women, especially, are not educated or advised properly before they are married off to people they hardly know, because that’s just how arranged marriages work. In the case that Sheerin shares, it is obvious that what happened there was a classic case of marital rape.
