Saturday 4 April 2009

Swat girl's public sexual exploitation

A video that has recently surfaced (kudos to Geo TV), has left Pakistan in shock. It shows a girl being beaten by a flog by a bearded man while others were holding her from arms, legs and sides of the chest, in the presence of dozens of onlookers, all men. This happened in Swat where Taliban are spreading like cancer.



I, myself, haven't been able to watch this video in its entirety. I have even seen beheadings of men on TV and internet without getting much disturbed but cannot bear to see this video. It's too much.

A point, that much of Pakistani media has largely ignored or has not dared to say given the unanimous support for censorship of sexual discussion on TV, is that at one point in the video, you can clearly see the girl being hit on her buttocks. Consequently, her posterior shook and moved as a perfectly natural reflex to sudden pain. The girl was fairly young, some media report her as 17-year-old, and this scene of her backside in that kind of environment was equivalent to a woman being publicly stripped to her undergarments in a western country.

This is obviously sexual exploitation if not rape. There is no denial that biologically a woman's posterior is a cause of sexual attraction for men and this girl's was hit publicly without any regard for her privacy and self-respect for a crime which was not proven by any law, Islamic or secular. (Most secular laws and procedures in the West are very similar to those in Islam.)

A human being's buttocks by any scale are a sexual part and violation of this part is sexual exploitation and abuse. These men should be arrested and tried under Pakistani laws for sexual abuse and believe me the punishment for sexual abuse in Pakistan is extremely harsh and even life threatening.