Previous month, the already infamous district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, under Prime Minister Imran Khan’s rule for 8 years now, served us a fresh reminder that we are no better at protecting our children.
The little baby girl, who went missing at 2 pm on Wednesday, March 24, from Khattak Colony, was found from a nearby water drain on March 25 at 6:30 am. It was in a state of decomposition. The girl had been sexually assaulted, and strangled to death, according to the post-mortem report of Kohat Development Authority.
She was three years old. Her name was Hareem Fatima.
Hareem went out of the house to play with other children. She never returned.
Some pictures and videos of little Hareem was shared on electronic, social, and print media. I saw two pictures. Both moved me alot and brought tears to my eyes. In the first picture I saw of Hareem, the little, underage, and lovely angel was dressed in a yellow shirt speckled with pink and blue standing in a lawn, stunningly gorgeous face with furrowing eyebrows, looks utterly calm while facing the camera, and giving a winsome smile. I kept looking at her, it was so evident that she was full of life and potential but became a victim to the wildest horror of patriarchy.
On her shirt, written in big black letters in caps was pretty. And certainly, she was.
The second picture I saw was so grisly, despicable and gut-wrenching. The photo that should haunt the conscience of every Pakistani. Consciences that are still alive. It shows Hareem is no more. She silenced forever. She slept permanently. She’ll never open her eyes again. Her smile will never appear on her face. Her tied face and the decayed corpse was a mirror to society. She did not live long enough to have a story from a life that was so cruelly seized away from her.
The curtail rape of a child is the basest of humanity, and strangling and killing and drowning is twofold that. Stop for a while and invigorate: Did she deserve the decomposition? It is a wake-up call to the apathetic soul of a nation. The pain of little Hareem, God Almighty. What she went through is fundamentally beyond imagination, beyond belief. How many times she would not have cried, how scared she would not have been, how many times she would not have screamed to her mother and God for help, but the ruthless killer didn’t show any mercy. No one perceives her calls. Not a single person alleviate Hareem’s pain. We failed to safeguard her. We are deeply disappointed. I couldn’t stop cogitating about her. I cry for days. I couldn’t sleep well many nights. I have no words to express the enormity and grief which gripped my heart while writing. I wasn’t writing then, wasn’t on Twitter. I gathered my nerves and think I should write about her now.
The uttermost population of Pakistan following the tragedy vociferously bays for a public hanging, life imprisonment, lashes, stoning and other forms of extreme penalties. My reservation is plain and simple: one hanging will absolutely not protect thousands of Hareem’s. If we are genuinely buckling down to address child abuse/rape, we must invest this outrage and thirst for revenge towards a clean, transparent and thorough system of law to grapple with institutional/societal failures and endorse the futility of quick fixes. This is the only strongest defence so far against penalty.
I hope the perpetrators of this dastardly act are apprehended and given the severest possible punishment under the law. But when will these traumatic and horrified incidents cease to occur, when will we as a constructive society work at all levels to avert such incidents in the future? When? There is a colossal structural issue, so deeply ingrained within our decaying society, so deep-rooted, and feasible through a multi-pronged approach, radical, and comprehensive reforms.
Starting with obstructing the loopholes in the justice system against the occurrence of all such serious crimes that are gaining alarming proportions is fair. Rape victims in Pakistan commonly face perplexities in lodging their FIR’s against perpetrators because police, prosecution and lower judiciary collude to delay trials, weaken cases and the system can be bought at multiple points.
I personally monitored various cases and witnessed the insensitive behaviour of the police station administration, which adds further anguish to the grief-stricken parents, who display rare courage to seek justice after their daughter goes through the hell of a rape. Laws and punishments are like chalk and cheese for the elite and the poor in Pakistan. In a homogeneous rape-murder, police and courts would have acted differently, if the culprits were sons of a tycoon, a minister, a feudal lord. Frequently criminal activities have strong political lobbies backing them using lip service.
Police reforms, the primary objective of the Imran Khan government, in resisting FIRs and pre-emption is very much needed. But his government disappointed us, same as the previous does. In an effective system, police barely registered FIR upon complaint from the child’s parents about her being missing, traced her and abductors via the help of intelligence agencies and fend off her rape and murder.
Secondly, the government must also bring forth mental health awareness and reforms at all levels starting from home, educate boys/men how to behave – from a primary school to university level, madrassas, Friday sermons, media, ads, billboards and edify them to be a kind, decent and good human being to one another who wouldn’t even think of harming anyone, to be aware of their vicinity, highlight the importance of speaking, listening, empathy, response and invigorate them to speak up when abused. We need to change the mindset and intent. An extensive process but do-able.
We must also invest towards long term systemic changes where we teach boys and men that women are equivalently human; empower equal partaking of women at every workplace especially policy-making, peace talks, government, parliament, law enforcement, and judiciary; and end the impunity with which men make women’s lives hell, there is little hope.
So many children are getting raped, tortured, killed every day. It’s almost as if one-hour news bulletins becoming minuscule to accommodate all the cases. Lynchings occur. People watch and do nothing. This utterly invigorated me to pen something. I savvy that my words and write-up cannot bring Hareem back nor undo the tragedy that happened to her. What little I can do is to reminisce her for some time. To ensure the rule of law is supreme in the redressal of a gruesome incident.
Make no mistake: one more rape murder of the daughter of Eve is not a mere addition in the bulk of statistics of violence against children. One more child rape-murder is an indelible and stubborn stain on the very soul of a society that will become darker, murkier, and scarier with each passing day.
May you get justice, little Hareem.
May your heart, soul and body heal, little Hareem.
May in death you find the childhood all children of the world deserve – happy, carefree, safe, little Hareem.
