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-Photo by Hussain Afzal |
This is not the usual tale of terror. Terror’s usual ingredients - the explosion, the recovered head and the severed limbs, the bits and pieces of human flesh - are not present here.
It begins in a library, and not the one that has been named after al Qaeda chief, Osama Bin Laden. Those sorts of terrors have developed their own digestive mechanisms within the Pakistani media - for the one discussed here, there is still no vocabulary.
The venue for this terror is Punjab University, one of the country’s largest state universities. Thousands pin their hopes on institutions like this one, clamouring to get in, cramming for exams, hoping for jobs.
On the University’s many campuses, all pictured green lawned and well-manicured on the website, are thousands of female students. They are said to be doing far better than their male counterparts, but there are few studies to prove it.
The truths of female superiority are not ones that get much nurturing in Pakistan. The girls are nevertheless there, different numbers adopting different strategies of survival on a co-educational campus in an increasingly segregated country.
Some wear scowls and sullen expressions, others swathe themselves in yards of fabric; whatever works to eke out an education. Theirs are the paths of delicate compromises; with reluctant parents, with crowing clerics, with harassing male students and with apathetic administrations.
Also read: The injustice of silence
With these burdens as the background, one young female student at the Punjab University campus made her way to the library for the Institute of Social and Cultural Studies.
It was an ordinary autumn day and she was an ordinary girl. As is the case with many students, she needed research materials. A paper was due and she had to find sources to cite; materials she assumed, would be available at the library.
With this simple errand in mind, she approached one of the staff members at the facility. He told her that most of the books in the library were kept on the second floor and on the other side of the facility. She went with him.
There, he sexually assaulted her.
In this tale of terror, the victim dies a living death. If she goes to the University Administration, she will have to reveal her identity. If her identity is revealed, she will be, as all rape victims are in Pakistan, dragged through the coals of dishonor and blame. The law on the books demands that she produce four witnesses to validate the crime; an impossibility in her case as it is in many others.
Then, there are the cautionary tales of female college students who have spoken out. The last girl raped on her way to college earlier this year, burned herself alive outside a police station. Each and every one of her rapists had been set free. There are too many stories like hers, and every girl in Pakistan knows them.
Also read: The trivialization of rape in Pakistan
This other terror, which lurks in libraries, in unfrequented corners of busy offices, is negotiated through the constrictions of threats and shame and fear is worse than the loud and visible conflagration of shootings and bombings.
It lurks unseen, eating from within the innards of a country that denies all that it cannot see. The choices before the girls of Pakistan are all bad ones; speaking up insures only greater punishments, staying silent means dying inside.
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In never being able to tell their stories, they remain isolated, each victim of the demonic librarian, the lecherous boss and the criminal professor condemned to never knowing how many hundreds more are suffering from the same inflictions.
In the disbelief of the nation is every rapists’ first victory, the second is in the confidence of knowing that if any woman decides to speak up, she will be killed again, this time by the consensus of the whole country.