A 20-year-old Azerbaijani woman who came to Pakistan for business has now recorded her statement before a Lahore magistrate after alleging that three men gang-raped her in a rented flat near Raiwind. Police say the suspects have been identified, their names recommended for placement on the Provisional National Identification List, and the vehicle allegedly used in the crime seized. All of that is necessary. None of it answers the more damning question of why Lahore is confronting another such case involving foreign women in the same police jurisdiction within four months. In June, women from the Netherlands and Venezuela alleged that they had been abducted, sexually assaulted and extorted in the same area. At some point, repetition stops looking like misfortune and starts looking like failure. Punjab cannot keep presenting each case as an isolated outrage while the pattern itself grows harder to ignore.
Pakistani women are entitled to exactly the same urgency, but cases involving foreign visitors bring an additional humiliation. Pakistan wants tourists, investors and business travellers to see a country open for engagement. That sales pitch becomes difficult to sustain when women arrive here and leave behind allegations of abduction, rape and extortion.
Punjab does not lack laws, cameras or policing infrastructure. It has specialised investigation units, Safe City surveillance and stronger sexual-offence legislation than it had a decade ago. Yet police recorded 4,446 rape cases and 940 gang-rape cases in the province during the first six months of this year. More than 20,000 crimes against women were registered over the same period.
Furthermore, the Lahore High Court lamented in May that poor investigation, weak prosecution and mishandling of forensic evidence were among the main reasons behind the low conviction rate. In one case, failures in DNA handling and chain of custody were serious enough to weaken the prosecution itself. This is how cases are lost after television cameras leave–not because the law is absent, but because the system handling it is careless enough to blunt its force.
The present investigation appears to have moved quickly. It should. But swift action after a high-profile complaint cannot become the exception paraded as proof that the system works. Nor can a city call itself safe because cameras can reconstruct a crime after it has already destroyed somebody’s life.
Lahore has spent heavily on the image of a secure, modern metropolis. That image now sits uncomfortably beside repeated allegations of sexual violence involving women who came here trusting the city enough to work, travel or stay.
