With every new dawn, the ghastly violence against women takes a surge like an inferno driving our society towards wilderness. The toxic masculinity is rampant with justifications and excuses for torturing women and then taking them for granted. The only reason she is confronted with this rage is her being a woman and therefore she has no right to articulate herself and improve the quality of her daily life. Women are the scapegoats of a man’s anger if they dare to assert their individuality and therefore suffer from physical, sexual and mental harassment. They have a very narrow space in the man-made power structures which hit them hard and treat them as weak and timid creatures.

The heinous murder of Noor Muqaddam, the heart-wrenching Minar-e-Pakistan incident, the gruesome killing of Myra Zulfiqar, the barbaric assault of the lady in the Motorway Rape Case, the brutal murder of Quratulain and the grisly stabbing of Khadija Siddique are some of the horrible examples of the deep-rooted misogynistic mind-set eating the civilised us like a termite. By and large, honour killing of women, punishing women of men’s crime in the tribal areas, forced marriages, acid attacks and torturing them for producing a girl are case after case of savagery taking place day in and day out in the ‘Islamic Republic’ of Pakistan.

In the context of Fanonian “Other”, a woman is chaotic, irrational, feminine and subordinate, a lesser being who is born and bound to suffer every atrocity inflicted upon her by a man, whereas, a man is “Self” who is ordered, rational, masculine and good, a superior creation licensed to assert his chauvinistic mentality on a woman. In our part of the world, all the heroic endeavours are associated with men whereas all we hear about women is rape, assault, sexism and death. The Premier in an interview opined that if a female will wear few clothes the men are bound to harass her because they are not robots. Imagine how such a statement not only justify the acts of criminals but reinforces in bringing up a complicit psyche. But alas! The system has utterly failed the woman in providing her the justice she so rightly deserves.

Ironically, every time this avalanche of violence takes place, the sociopaths hidden behind a charming façade choose to be totally oblivious of the truth. Even if they nod in arrogance, everybody would starts putting blame on the woman instead of the perpetrator, by putting forth questions on her character like who was she to him, what was she doing there, why has she gone there, she must not have been in a moderate clothing, pointing fingers like she should not have gone out at this hour and at that hour, she should have accompanied herself with the male members, didn’t she know that men are men, if she is found involved in the aforementioned ‘sins’, they would definitely harass her. Such loud bangs about the victim divert the attention of everyone from the perpetrator giving him an edge to roam freely yet again just to quench his sexual frustration on a new victim. Apart from victim blaming, we make ourselves comfortable by arguing that it is the machination of India or America to defame us because we simply do not want to reflect into our inner selves as to where we are heading as a society and thus sleep peacefully at night. It is dumbfounding that the blood-thirsty men drool heedlessly while women are confined, restricted and silenced. Unfortunately, such acts not only strengthen these demons but also weaken the morality of the victim to come forward and speak up. The crimes will stop only when we will take measures to punish the oppressor and not the oppressed.

Hence, proposing a ban on the TikTokers from en routing the public spheres is not a solution of this epidemic. A credulity that this will put a halt to the crime, let us also prohibit a woman from merely existing because the danger to their dignities is also from their male relatives in the private spaces of their homes. Abstain her not to go to her grave alone lest she will be harassed there too. Refrain from sending little girls and boys to schools and madrassahs since they may not be assaulted by their male teachers as well. Restrict all the women at home and refrain them from going to their workplaces, markets and everywhere else so that the countless bullies ready to subjugate them may be stopped. Such a complacency simply serves to weight off the minds leaving the victim with multiplied agony and trauma to haunt her even more and the evil prevails to rot the society to the core.

Beginning the charity at home, we must stop tagging our sons with the specific gender roles. Most of the time, boys get admission in expensive private schools, in contrast to their sisters who are readily thought to be good enough in a local education system. The boys at home are always told that they are stronger than their sisters, they are men so they are not supposed to cry, they are at liberty to go out whenever they want to, they are not made to do the household chores. Such mental programming at home gives them a free-will to exercise this ‘power’ on women outside. Moreover, the way a boy observes his father treating the mother, he will consciously build up a credo that this is where a woman stands, this is what her value is and this is how a woman must be served in anyway. At the educational institutes where the young men are forming their world view, they must be educated that the worth of a woman is not conditional to Maa, Behan, Beti, they must be taught that a woman should be respected simply because she is a human being just like a man is. The justice system and the prosecution laws of the country must be so vigorous that no such maniac should be spared from robust accountability. Moreover, the women of our country must be empowered economically, mentally, socially and morally so that they themselves are able to break the shackles of those man-made social structures that belittle their stature in the society. There is a dire need to incorporate the subjects of sex education and critical thinking in the Single National Curriculum (SNC), so that our future generations can see an empowered woman living in a femicide-free Pakistan.

YUSRA SULEMAN

The writer is a former research supervisor and lecturer of English at University of Gujrat, Lahore Campus