After girl’s killing, Pakistani women speak out on abuse

KASUR, Pakistan — The brutal rape and killing of Zainab Ansari, a 7-year-old 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 in Kasur.

Across Pakistan, thousands protested, condemning police inaction and blaming the government for failing

“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 selfmotivated 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 Pakhtunkhwa, in northwestern Pakistan.

Kasur is a congested district of around 2.5 million people in eastern Pakistan, near the border with India. The city of Kasur is surrounded by brick kilns and tanneries and has hundreds of small factories, all of which employ children — making them vulnerable to abuse. to protect children.