In an interview with the journalist, Jonathan Swan, for Axios on HBO, Prime Minister Imran Khan was asked about the comments he had made about rape and vulgarity back in April. In response, Khan talked about how societies are different and what may not tempt others in a Western society may tempt some in a society like ours and how it has consequences. When Swan asked if he thought that what women wear has any effect, the Pakistani prime minister responded: “If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the men, unless they are robots. I mean it’s common sense.”

Following Khan’s comments, we saw some backlash on social media as well as mainstream media for blaming the victims of sexual violence. A video of a local TV channel’s talk show host, in which he compared women with toffees, also went viral on social media a few days later. He said that if we leave an unwrapped candy on the road, nobody will eat it because viruses, bacteria, germs and insects would have attacked the ‘unwrapped toffee’ so nobody would touch the candy. It was his way of explaining what the prime minister meant. Not only was the candy analogy extremely offensive, but to think that such an example would justify any comments related to victim blaming was equally insulting to our intelligence. What was even more disappointing was a press conference by three women parliamentarians of the ruling party who denied that there was any victim blaming by the prime minister in his interview. Maybe they forgot that Khan responded to Swan’s question with “[i]f a woman is wearing...” The right response would have been to say that it does not matter what a woman was wearing and not that a man who is not a robot will be affected by a woman’s choice of clothes. Does this mean that men who do not rape or men who do not act on their baser instincts are robots? This should have offended every decent man as well because it seems that our prime minister thinks that men cannot control their urges and would resort to sexual violence if ‘tempted’. It also means that Khan doesn’t
understand that rape is not a crime of lust but is about power, control, and humiliating the victim.

Victim blaming is quite common all over the world, including Western societies, when it comes to sexual violence. What was a woman wearing, why was she out late at night, why was she travelling alone, why did she not tell anyone, why did she behave normally the next day and so on? We recently saw something similar in the Goa court verdict on the Tarun Tejpal case. It has been criticized for casting aspersions on the victim’s character and questioning her conduct after the assault. “The printouts of photographs clearly proves that the prosecutrix was absolutely in a good mood, happy, normal and smiling... she did not look distressed or traumatised in any manner whatsoever though this was immediately a few minutes after she claims to have been sexually assaulted by the accused putting her in a state of panic and trauma.” This is a classic case of victim blaming and mirrors the larger perception of how an ‘ideal victim’ of sexual assault should behave. In a TED talk on rape myths, the journalist and activist, Pavan Amara, talked about a survey conducted by her, wherein she asked the public about what they thought a rape survivor would do the next day. Most of them said that the victims would go to the police. But when women who had been raped were asked the same question, some of them said they dropped off their children at school, some said they went back to work, some said they did all kinds of other things and tried to carry on.

In Pakistan, the Supreme Court gave a landmark ruling on rape cases back in March. In a judgment authored by Justice Mansoor Ali Shah, the apex court said: “A woman, whatever her sexual character or reputation may be, is entitled to equal protection of law. No one has the license to invade her person or violate her privacy on the ground of her alleged immoral character.” The judgment further said: “Even if the victim of rape is accustomed to sexual intercourse, it is not determinative in a rape case; the real fact-in-issue is whether or not the accused committed her rape.” The court also said that derogatory expressions like “habituated to sex”, “woman of easy virtue”, “woman of loose moral character”, and “non-virgin” should not be used for rape survivors. That this needed to be said in the 21st century says a lot about the culture of victim blaming. These instances also show how deep patriarchy runs in our societies and how the onus to prove the crime is usually on the victims and survivors of sexual violence instead of the perpetrators of these heinous crimes against women. Someday, hopefully, this mindset will change. Someday, our societies will stop blaming the victims, start believing them and will only blame the culprits instead of questioning the victims and survivors. Someday soon.

Mehmal Sarfraz is a journalist based in Lahore; mehmal.s@gmail.com