Village council members arrested for allegedly ordering rape of teenager as punishment for sexual assault committed by her brother

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Police in Pakistan have arrested 26 members of a village council for allegedly ordering the rape of a teenager as punishment for a sexual assault committed by her brother.

The girl, 17, was raped last week at the direction of the council as revenge for a sexual assault allegedly committed two days earlier against a child in the same village by the teenage girl’s brother.

The man who was ordered to rape the teenager was the brother of the initial victim, local police official Malik Rashid said.

He said the state would act as plaintiff in the case and refuse to free those convicted in exchange for compensation, an option available under the country’s Islamic legal system. “The state will not give up any sort of agreement,” Rashid said.

The incident, which occurred in Muzaffarabad, a village near Multan in the southern province of Punjab, came to light after the teenage girl’s mother complained to police.



The mother alleged in the complaint that members of the council were present at the time of the punitive rape. Medical examinations have reportedly confirmed sexual assaults in both cases.

On Thursday the chief justice of Pakistan’s supreme court, Saqib Nisar, ordered a police inquiry on Thursday into the incident, which has sparked uproar in the country and abroad.

“Pakistan’s judiciary has time and again declared these local councils to be unconstitutional and [have] no legal standing,” said lawyer and activist Asma Jahangir. “Such decisions and parallel justice should end now.”

The village councils, or jirgas, are a traditional means of settling disputes in Pakistan’s rural areas, where the legal system can be mistrusted or out of reach.

The councils are illegal but such “honour” punishments are still common, especially in rural areas. In another case that gained international prominence, a village council in 2002 ordered the gang rape of Mukhtar Mai as revenge for taking her rapists to court.

Mai was offered refuge in other countries but chose to stay and open a school for rural girls. She tweeted on Thursday that the case showed “we are still in 2002”.

Mukhtar Mai (@MukhtarMai) Another Tribe Court (Panchayt) in south Punjab Multan and another girl was raped. We are still in 2002.

Her story inspired an opera, Thumbprint, which opened in New York in 2014 and premiered in Los Angeles last month.

The chief minister of Punjab, Shehbaz Sharif, has suspended several police officers including the Multan police chief for delays in conducting arrests.

“Unfortunately, there could not be a worse example of extreme negligence by the police,” he said.

He told a press conference: “I will not sit with ease until all the criminals in this case are punished in accordance to the law.”

Tahira Abdullah, a human rights activist, said the jirga councils invariably marginalised women and “such decisions have ruined the lives of thousands”.

“Justice is the right of each and every citizen of the country and only a fair legal system can provide that, not such councils,” she said.

Pakistan is regarded as one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman, with 2014 research finding that each day six women were kidnapped, four were murdered, four were raped and three took their own lives.

More than 1,000 women and girls in the country are murdered in “honour killings” each year, according to the Aurat Foundation, a human rights group.

The dishonourable killing of Qandeel Baloch Read more

In one high-profile case last year, a social media celebrity who also lived in Multan was strangled by her brother for posting videos and pictures he considered too provocative.



Qandeel Baloch, 26, was compared to Kim Kardashian for her subversive use of social media and sly, sometimes satirical displays of sexuality in the deeply conservative country.

British citizen Samia Shahid was murdered in Punjab last year by her father and first husband for divorcing and remarrying without permission.

A police report said the 28-year-old’s family felt “dishonoured” by the divorce that Shahid had organised in a sharia court in Bradford in 2012 after a brief and unhappy marriage.



In October, Pakistan’s parliament passed legislation that introduced the death penalty for rape and closed a loophole permitting perpetrators of honour killings to go free if forgiven by the victim’s family.

But the legislation, which was introduced against the objections of hardline religious groups, still permits victim’s families to waive the death penalty for offenders.