Session I
Women in Sindh and Punjab: Experiences and constructions of multi-layered violence
by Lubna Nazir Chaudhry, USA
Based on interviews and field observations compiled during a World Bank-funded qualitative investigation of poverty in Sindh and Punjab (World Bank 2002), the paper will delineate rural Pakistani women's constructions and experiences of both everyday and extraordinary forms of violence. In fact, a key point is to highlight how the politics underpinning extraordinary forms of violence such as murder, rape, and the violation of property rights are inextricably embedded within the taken-for-granted processes of structural exclusion framing the everyday lives of so-called ordinary women and their families. During the data collection process, an attempt was made to engage the women who agreed to be my research participants in a critique of the sociopolitical as well as economic contexts of their lives. While the analysis presented in the paper will be mediated by conceptual categories and explanatory paradigms that are a consequence of my training and thinking, rural women's constructions of their reality and lives remain at the center of this inquiry. In addition, what men say about women's lives in the various research sites as well as facts elicited from various sources will be used to shed light on the lives of women and the multi-faceted gendered constructions that shape and are shaped by women's experiences.
While I appear to privilege the local in my focus on the everyday lives of women in specific contexts, a broader intent is to blur the dichotomy between the micro and the macro levels of analysis by pointing out how the effects of regional, national, and global power structures are manifested in the local within the village, the community, and the family, to name a few domains. Patriarchal discourses emanating from different quarters-- ranging from global capitalist agendas to the state, from transnational socio-religious formations to regional feudalism-- intersect with notions of gendered behavior, responsibilities, and roles circulating in villages, sub-communities, and families. The impact of these discourses on particular women's lives is of course not homogenous. Caste, class, religion, and geographical location are the chief vectors of differentiation among the women within the different research sites. The analysis will therefore take into account the different nuances of structural and direct violence for women based on their social location.
An important strand of the paper is an attention to the issue of women's agency in the contexts under scrutiny. While the space for collective action and individual acts of resistance remains constrained by overwhelming obstacles to women's attempts to transform violent economic and sociopolitical realities, the fieldwork did yield stories of resilience, creativity, and rebellion in the face of all odds. The women in the study were definitely not passive beings, yet they felt that their acts of agency and assertion remained ineffectual, because there was no structural support for any of their initiatives to reduce their vulnerability and insecurity. The paper will thus problematicize the feminist deployment of conceptions such as agency and resistance when it comes to an understanding of the violence in women's lives.
State Violence Against Women: A Consideration of Gujarat & Manipur
by Ritu Menon, India
Recent feminist analyses of ethnic or communal conflict in South Asia have noted a marked increase in state violence against women. This takes many forms, from assault and violation by agencies of the state-- under the pretext of search and seizure in "disturbed" areas-- to deliberate withholding of protection and security during riots.
This paper looks at two major occurrences-- the Gujarat carnage of 2002, and the more recent (August 2004) rape and murder of a woman activist by the Armed Forces in Manipur-- for overt and covert state violence against women. Through a discussion of both events, the paper attempts an analysis of:
(i) the role of the state in perpetrating sexual violence;
(ii) its dangerous shift from protector to criminal violator; and
(iii) its immunity from all laws against the violation of women.
By doing so, it traces its transition from being a "state above the law" to a criminal state, when it explicitly participates in brutal violence, especially against marginalized women.
Honor Killings in Pakistan
by Saba Gul Khattak, Kiran Ahmed and Kiran Habib, Pakistan
The paper presents the issue of honor killings in Pakistan, in three main contexts: standpoints in the debate on honor killings; role of courts; and dynamics of policy making that have contributed to the state’s inability to eradicate honor killings.
The first section examines the debate on honor killings and covers different kinds of literature ranging from academic articles and books, government reports, international and national human rights organization reports, NGO newsletters and reports, as well as seminar and conference presentations. It demonstrates that the widespread and mistaken association of honor killings with the non-western, mostly Islamic world is now being challenged by different scholars. They also trace back history in different geographical contexts to uncover the nexus between patriarchy and honor and the genesis of honor killings. It concludes that it is wrong to label non-western, Muslim or tribal societies with honor killings. In fact there is a long list of places like Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Latin America and Australia where a patriarchal structure is maintained that sanctions control over women’s bodies, hence providing a basis for honor killings.
The second section examines the role of courts and concludes that the legal system works in favor of the feudal landlords. The agents that enforce the law (police and judiciary) are often themselves products of the same system. So rather than bringing the murderers to justice, their priorities are to maintain their jobs and reinforce their loyalty to their tribes.
The third section reviews the policies of the government and its functionaries with regard to honor killings and Hudood Law. The state’s inability to eliminate honor killings cannot be understood without comprehending the dynamics that inform policy making. It ascribes this failure to the existence of social norms and cultures that live on in collective memory, informed by masculinist ideologies whether in the east or in the west. It demonstrates that such killings take place because there is tacit support for the practice at different levels of society. This section highlights the lack of follow up and commitment to this issue at four specific levels: heads of state and ministers; parliament; political parties (whose members go into parliament) and donor agencies (who exert influence upon the government through financing social sector development).
Session II
Honor Killings and Violence against Women in Punjab, Pakistan
by Ali Abbas Qazilbash and Masooma Qazilbash, Pakistan
Objectives
This study was designed to highlight the plight of women in Pakistan in terms of the violence and abuse that they face. To contribute towards the understanding of the extent of honor killings in particular and VAW in general in Punjab, Pakistan.
Data Source
This study has been carried out over a period of three months (June - August, 2003) in Lahore and Islamabad. Two groups of people have been interviewed to obtain primary data:
- People who contributed and/or were involved, directly, or indirectly in helping the survivors of honor killings. This included: lawyers, prominent NGO activists and experts, Islamic scholars and professors, members of parliament, judges, journalists, etc.
- The violence/abuse survivors in government crisis centers, shelter homes by NGOs, Dar-ul-Aman were also interviewed. Specific individual cases like those of Zahida Perveen and Samia Sarwar were studied in-depth to understand the complexities behind VAW.
The source of secondary data has been numerous NGO reports, newspaper clippings and articles and books written by experts of the field.
Methodology
The present study was a qualitative research study. Thirty, one-to-one interview with the professionals were conducted to develop insight into the subject. The respondents were selected through purposive sampling technique.
Interviews and case studies of the violence survivors were also conducted. These interviews were semi-structured with mostly open-ended questions and continued till the point of saturation was reached.
Policy Relevance
Daily newspapers, particularly the English dailies are littered with headlines of cases of gender-based violence reported throughout the country. Constitutional legitimacy of discriminatory laws like that of the Hudood Ordinance lays credence to such horror and promotes acts of violence against women. Previous and present governments have all promised to review such laws and re-constitute them so as to prevent their abuse, but have failed to deliver on this policy reform. In order to make some meaningful contribution to curb the custom of honor killings and other acute forms of physical as well as psychological violence, the actual extent of such actions must be determined, followed by the setting up of crisis centers and shelters where these women may seek refuge and receive counseling from trained professionals. Work is being done in this regard but it is insufficient in terms of the need of hour. Government agencies, line departments, civil society and activist groups must coordinate their efforts to address the issue of VAW in its totality. The problem must be analyzed holistically, in terms of addressing poverty, girl-child education, gender empowerment, RH rights, socio-economic equity and the role of men, in order to curb this act of violence. Civil society groups must organize mass awareness campaigns and organizations working for gender equity and equality, to create mass mobilization in order to politically influence the nations decisions makers to the appropriate action to put an end to these discriminatory laws.
Politics of the Body and the Body Politic: Gendered Violence in Pakistan
by Rubina Saigol, Pakistan
Gendered violence in Pakistan is located in a complex matrix of power and the hierarchies of class, caste, tribe and religion. The family, community, nation and state collude in the murder, rape and mutilation of women’s bodies in an attempt to mark their own existence as social collectivities. The marking of women’s bodies in the construction of the body politic is a move that is simultaneously symbolic and material. The woman’s body demarcates the boundaries of the acceptable and unacceptable, the licit and the illicit, the permissible and the forbidden. As a symbolic representation of the family, the community, the nation and the state, and the source of the continuity of the social collective, the woman’s body signifies threat as well as survival, annihilation as well as continuity through reproduction, and transgression as well as containment. Women’s material existence equally signifies threat or loss, as well as gain or profit through property relations, economic transactions and exchange of women as commodities. Women’s symbolic and material values interact and crisscross at various levels in transactions between men.
As women are heavily invested with communal, familial and nationalist passions, and arouse fear and anxiety over trespass, control over them and in particular over their sexuality, becomes an urgent national, communal and religious matter. Any attempt by women to gain a measure of control over their sexual choices becomes a matter of national, religious and communal concern. Hence the right to marry a person of their choice or the right to divorce a person not desired become threats to class reproduction as well as to religion, nation and community, which invoke State power in their protection. At the same time, violating sexual norms aggressively by marking the bodies of the women of ‘enemy’ communities, or rival social groups, becomes a simultaneous destruction of the threatening outsider and a re-construction of the Self. It enables men to re-establish the impermeable boundaries of class, caste, community or nation and to reassert the divisions between the licit and illicit.
The State, which is often considered a repository of modern, rational and impersonal systems and values, capitulates to the norms of communities, families and ethnic sub-groups in protecting the established boundaries. In the process, the State itself becomes increasingly tribalized, communalized and patriarchal. As so-called age-old, traditional and customary practices adjust themselves to the modern state, the state in turn adapts itself to their imperatives. As a result, patriarchal practices run all the way from the family and community to the state and nation, and customary and traditional practices take on uniquely modern features that help to reinforce and maintain these practices. State functionaries, tribal and feudal lords, and men from various strata of society gain materially from the political economy of cultural violence, which sustains the customary practices and is in turn sustained by them. Four cases in Pakistan, those of Samia Sarwar, Saima Waheed Ropri, Zafran Bibi and Mukhtaran Mai, illustrate the complex intersections of patriarchy, economy, State, community, nation and gendered violence.
Violence Against Women
by Nausheen Ahmad, Pakistan
SDPI, in conjunction with Norad, undertook a study on Honour Killings and Hudood Laws in October 2004. The two aspects were considered to be interconnected as both presented attempts through different means to regulate the conduct of women. The report raises issues of whether the policing of women is only a consequence of underlying customary practice stemming from strong tribal and feudal structures or whether the customary practices and the cultural attitude are supported by State structure and laws. It also reviews the relationship between the underlying feudal and tribal structures and religious ideology. Whereas, the Hudood Laws owe their justification to religious ideology, honour killing is rooted in customary practice. Both have the effect of putting women in a disadvantageous position. The report concludes that the structure of the State including State law and the Courts are far from neutral and in reality because of their close linkage to culture and custom reflect the dominant ideology of the time. The various organs of the State converge to protect the status quo and since women remain excluded from the centre of powers whether of the formal State Law or of customary practice their rights are neither safeguarded nor protected.
The October 2004 study has been updated to include a review of the Law passed by the National Assembly on honour killing and the proposed Settlement of Disputes Ordinances. The Government’s initiative against honour killing in a scenario where the Hudood Ordinance 1979 and the Qisas and Diyat laws remain in force can be at best viewed as lip service rather than a serious attempt to bring about change. In the meanwhile, newspapers continue to report jirga decisions and honour killings. Pakistan has also been shaped irrevocably by the dynamics of civilian-military relations and the need of the military to align itself with Islamism. General Parvez Musharraf’s regime is no exception in this regard.
This paper therefore questions whether given the imperatives of the State where it has to cater to tribalism and feudalism at one level and support Islamism at another level, meaningful change is a possibility at all.
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