After girl’s killing, Pakistani women speak out on abuse
KASUR, Pakistan — The brutal rape and killing of Zainab Ansari, a 7-yearold girl whose body was left in a garbage dump, has unleashed a wave of revulsion around Pakistan, revealing a string of child abductions and killings by a suspected serial predator and generating outrage at a culture of silence surrounding sexual abuse.
Zainab’s death has even given birth to a nascent Pakistani version of #MeToo movement.
A number of prominent Pakistani women have come forward with their own stories of sexual assault, saying they want to change traditions that consider abuse as a mark of shame for the victim. Those traditions, they say, help predators get away with abuse and encourage an already corrupt police force to ignore such crimes.
Maheen Khan, a legendary Pakistani fashion designer, tweeted that she had been sexually abused as a child by a cleric who taught her the Quran. “I froze in fear day after day,” she tweeted. At 73, Khan has spoken publicly only once before of the abuse.
“We are now saying enough is enough. We should have woken up long ago,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in the southern city of Karachi. “I am ashamed to say it has taken this one little girl’s death.”
“What disturbs me the most is the silence when a little girl gets raped,” she said. “It has to do with the honor of family. Parents tell their daughters: ‘Don’t talk about it. Don’t tell anyone.’ Our silence is saying it is all right to sexually molest a child.”
The horror of Zainab’s killing was brought home for Pakistanis by a photo of her that went viral on social media, showing the smiling girl in her favorite bright pink coat, with a pink barrette holding back her hair. TV channels aired the photo alongside pictures of her lifeless body found Jan. 9, abandoned on a heap of garbage in her home city of Kasur.
Across Pakistan, thousands protested, condemning police inaction and blaming the government for failing to protect children.
“Whenever anybody saw her picture on social media or on electronic media everybody started weeping,” said Waqas Abid, a lawyer in Kasur who heads an activist group called the Good Thinkers Organization. “Everybody was self-motivated to come out from his or her house and ask for justice for Zainab.”
The Senate’s Standing Committee on the Interior, which oversees policing, launched an inquiry this week into the sexual assaults in Kasur, as well as into another recent attack in another part of the country — the rape and killing of a 4-year-old named Asma, whose body was left in a field near her home in Kyhber Pukhtunkhwa, in northwestern Pakistan.
Zainab was snatched in early January as she walked to a Quran class. Her parents were away on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, and the girl and her two sisters and brother were watched over by her aunts and uncles who all live in the same house in an impoverished neighborhood of narrow lanes on the outskirts of the city.
“I told Zainab often to be careful,” her mother, Nusrat Ansari, said. Wrapped in a large shawl obscuring her face, she held Zainab’s photo, describing how she loved to play games with her cousins. Her favorite was hide and seek.
On Tuesday, authorities announced the arrest of a suspect in connection with the series of killings, including Zainab’s. At a news conference in the Punjab provincial capital of Lahore, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif identified the suspect as Mohammed Imran. He was arrested near Kasur.