Men strip Pakistan woman, another raped for refusing marriage, says report
NEW DELHI (TrustLaw) - A woman was stripped and paraded naked in northwestern Pakistan as a punishment for her son who was found guilty of rape by a group of village elders, the Express Tribune reported on Tuesday.
The incident, in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, occurred after four men entered the woman's home in Haripur district, stripping her before dragging her into the streets of the village where they beat her with rifle butts.
The newspaper said last week a jirga – a tribal assembly of Muslim elders which makes decisions among Pashtun communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan – had found the victim's son and another man guilty of raping another man's wife.
"Police sources said the matter was later brought to the notice of local police by some rights activists and they had registered a case against jirga members," said the report.
The newspaper said these kinds of incidents are not isolated in the country. In January, a woman in Pakistan's southern province of Punjab was stripped naked and gang-raped for refusing to marry.
In many patriarchal and conservative communities across southern Asia, elderly men who set village rules are often accused of instigating violence and sometimes murder – often against women – in the name of culture and tradition.
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