Anti-rape NGO struggles to be heard

Juggling endless telephone calls, interrupted only by the incessant hum of the fax machine, and slicing through a mound of papers on her desk with practised ease, Ambreen Fatima stopped her apparent monologue into the telephone receiver abruptly as she speed-read the latest fax that had arrived. “May I call you back?” she asked, setting the phone down. This is what I’ve been waiting for,” she told her visitor, waving the paper triumphantly. She jotted down a series of neatly transcribed lines on the page, swivelling around to insert it in the fax machine. Fatima is the resident coordinator of War Against Rape (WAR), an NGO that concentrates its resources on battling the heinous crime. Housed in a small, two-room office close to the eastern city of Lahore’s business centre, the NGO was set up in the early 90s by a group of concerned citizens and activists after they saw the use of rape - as a means of coercion, as a means of religious conversion and as a means of simply invoking terror in a simple populace - escalate into disturbing numbers by the end of the 1980s. “I’m sorry I’m so rushed,” Fatima said, busily scribbling something onto yet another piece of paper before inserting that, too, into the fax machine. She had gone for a counselling session in the morning, she explained, with an eight-year-old girl who had been raped by her 15-year-old neighbour. “The perpetrator, who is also a minor according to law, was in the lock-up. But I think this case might end in a ‘compromise’,” she explained, using the local euphemism for “out-of-court settlement”. WAR handles five, sometimes six, sometimes more, cases a month that are “reported,” Fatima, a lawyer who has to do hands-on work at WAR, told IRIN. “There must be others that are never reported, or hushed up before they can get to us. So we work with the people who come to us for help,” she added. WAR works with rape victims, running awareness campaigns, providing them legal, medical and survival aid. “Side-by-side, we also provide them counselling,” Fatima maintained. “WAR takes pride in its size and focus,” Nadeem Fazil, one of the organisation’s founding members, told IRIN in Lahore. Fazil now works with the British NGO, ActionAid, in Lahore. “Our focus remains on sexual abuse and sex-crimes,” he explained. WAR was put together after two high-profile rape cases in the southern port city of Karachi in the early nineties,” Fazil remembers. “So a group of about 15 people got together: journalists, women’s rights activists, people from other NGOs. We all got together and used to hold meetings at different venues. Then, one of the fifteen council members paid the rent for an office we could keep so we were there for a year,” Fazil explained. The organisation operates with what Fazil termed “partial funding,” keeping its activities strictly focused on providing aid - medical, legal or otherwise - where it is required; and providing shelter when a rape victim, or victims, either approach them; or are seen to be in need. Girls from Pakistan’s small Christian minority are sometimes targeted for forcible conversions, mostly in the rural areas, by rich landlords and others who wield power, Joseph Francis, one of WAR’s council members and the co-ordinator for the Center for Legal Aid, Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS), told IRIN. “In Kasur, for example, just recently, two Christian girls were raped. It seemed to be another case of minority women being raped, then forcibly converted. I informed Ambreen and WAR will send a fact-finding mission so they can assess the situation for themselves,” Francis maintained. In another case, the son of an influential factory-owner raped a girl two or three times, converted her to Islam, married and then divorced her, Francis said. The girl was then put up at a residential “safe-house” that CLAAS operates; where women in similar straits are housed and protected. Although CLAAS was initially formed just to serve the minority community, it has expanded its portfolio since, and diversified so that it works in tandem with WAR and other women-specific NGOs; as well as other civil society groups. “For rape cases, if the FIR [First Incident Report] is not being registered for some reason, we help the victim do that,” Wasim Muntazer, deputy coordinator at CLAAS, told IRIN. “If the victim needs protection from the culprit, we provide them shelter,” he added, pointing out that about 183 sex-abuse-and-crime related cases were handled by CLAAS in 2003. “Punishments for perpetrators can vary from case-to-case,” Ambreen Fatima said, as she rustled through another pile of papers. “It doesn’t help much that most people who seek justice have no faith in our judicial system,” she said, pointing out that most out-of-court settlements were precipitated by that little anomaly in perception. “Also, people get scared away by the thought that a case might drag on for years and years,” she added. One example, Fatima said, was the strange case of an 8-year-old girl who was raped by a 20-year-old man. When the man was arrested and the case went to court, he was denied bail. However, the man’s family started threatening the victim and her kin, who pressed on, regardless. But things came to a head when pressure mounted on the little girl’s family - from neighbours and, interestingly enough, from within the child’s own extended family - they decided to withdraw the case, Fatima said. WAR, which has a ready panel of doctors and lawyers, as well as psychologists, who can be called up whenever the need arises, handled 64 reported cases in 2003, Fatima maintained. “Some were reported to police stations, some were referred to us by other NGOs. The most despicable one was the case of a six-year-old girl who was raped by a 65-year-old man. He is still in jail,” Fatima stressed. WAR also provides rape victims, and other women in need of refuge, safe haven in a home for women, run by the AGHS legal aid cell; a law firm that provides free legal services, mostly to women. Apart from the threat of social ostracism, grievous bodily harm from the perpetrators in case the victim should dare to file a case and a general sense of social apathy when it does happen, rape victims also have to contend with the Hudood Ordinance - according to which a woman who has been raped can be imprisoned and meted out corporal punishment, if she is unable to provide witnesses to the incident. The Ordinance, which also extends to crimes such as the consumption of alcohol and theft, was passed in 1979, during the military rule of Zia-ul-Haq. The law requires that an equivalent of four Muslim male witnesses of good character verify a woman’s claim to being raped, otherwise she runs the risk of being considered guilty. A former supreme court judge now deputed the task of heading the National Commission on the Status of Women told IRIN in October that the law - and its motive - was flawed. "It was brought in undemocratically, as an ordinance. If the present government really wants to bring in laws based on Islam, then the proposed laws should be circulated and debated publicly and in parliament, and it should ensure that they are in conformity with the injunctions of Islam, which the Hudood laws are not," Justice Majida Rizvi stressed.