They say women are not safe anywhere, guess they are right on that account to be it any country or any state. But here you will realize that even your own home is not safe for you. The family is the one entity which is supposed to be your safe place but what happens when that entity is the one from which you need to be saved. Recently a teenager in the Pakistani Punjab province has been sentenced to death for adultery. The 19-year-old was charged with having consensual sex with her cousin and upon denying the charges and instead of telling was she was the one who was forced to have sex with her cousin on gunpoint was abandoned by her family.
This girl said while giving her statement to the police at their home in Rajanpur, a rural district in southwest Punjab, said, “I could not raise an alarm as [he] was holding a gun, but the panchayat refused to accept my statement and declared that I willfully slept with him.”
Even though pleading and requesting the panchayat to listen to her side of the story the panchayat refused to do so and even her family has disowned her calling her a liar and asking the panchayat to give her the punishment as death.
The Pakistani Panchayats or the informal village justice systems that operate in remote areas in Pakistan have been criticised for handing out cruel punishments for adultery previously as well. Though the sentences they give out have no legal standing they are still followed. The girl informed the media that even the court took no action against her alleged rapist and held her responsible as well.
