Pakistan Moves to End Impunity for Rapists

ipsnews.net - *This story updates Raped and Abandoned by the Law published on May 3, 2014. LAHORE, Feb 3 2017 (IPS) - Amid a wave of reforms to tighten the country’s laws on honour killings and sexual assault, on Feb. 2, the Sindh Assembly passed a law making DNA testing in rape cases mandatory in the province.

It follows on the heels of a unanimous vote by Pakistan’s Parliament last October to plug gaps in the criminal justice system and boost the rate of conviction in rape cases.

The conviction rate for rape in Pakistan has been less than four percent, prompting protests and legal reforms.

For long, the sole reliance on eyewitnesses and circumstantial evidence has benefitted the accused in rape cases and conviction rates have remained negligible in the country.

The new national law, called The Anti-Rape Laws (Criminal Laws Amendment) Act, also makes DNA evidence admissible, calls for verdicts in rape cases to be announced within three months, and allows filing of appeals within six months.

It also gives approval to holding of in-camera trials and use of technological aids to record testimony of victims and witnesses in order to save victims from humiliation. In the past, many victims and their families would not pursue cases for this very reason.

The Battle to Take Rape off Thailand’s TV Screens

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Helen Roxburgh

In Thai soap operas, rape is often shown as a vehicle for revenge or a path to true love. Now activists are calling on producers to stop romanticizing the crime and feeding into the country’s culture of gender inequality.

To avenge his father’s death, Pathvee hunts down the only daughter of his father’s enemy, harasses her and rapes her. Then she falls in love with him and they live happily ever after. It might sound unlikely, but this is the plot of the popular Thai soap opera “Unending Fire of Passion,” which is far from unusual among Thai soaps in turning sexual violence into romance.

In “Sunset at Chao Praya,” the hero, Kobori, forces his new wife to have sex with him. In “Missing Heaven,” the lead character Kavee rapes the heroine Narin for family revenge, and in “The Power of Shadows” a handsome male character drunkenly rapes the female lead. In almost all cases, the women end up ultimately falling in love with their attackers.

A study by the Thai Health Promotion Foundation found that 80 percent of Thai soap operas, or lakhon, depicted rape or sexual violence in 2014. Characters who commit sexual violence are also rarely – if ever – held to account.

“The depictions of rape on TV relates to the concept of ‘good girl’ and ‘bad girl’ in traditional Thai society,” says Yupa Phusahas, senior program officer at nonprofit organization The Asia Foundation, Thailand. “If the female character is a good girl, the depiction of rape sometimes signals the male character’s love and affection for her. If the female character is a bad girl, the rape is punishment for immoral behavior or lack of virtue.”

But now public anger is growing as critics accuse these shows, typically broadcast during prime-time viewing hours, of normalizing rape. And the condemnation of soap opera rape is compounded by national outrage over real-life cases of sexual violence, including the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl on a train in 2014. A petition launched that same year calling for an end to romanticizing lakhon rape now has over 60,300 signatures.

In April, Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) launched guidelines for producers, encouraging them to be “cautious” when depicting violence against women and to include content that addresses men’s sexual responsibilities.

While the guidelines aren’t as stringent as activists were pushing for, they are seen as a step in the right direction. In July, NBTC took action against the makers of a TV soap called “Club Friday” over a scene where a female villain is raped as another character films it. The commission fined the channel 50,000 Thai baht ($1,400), forced it to increase the program’s audience suitability rating and said those scenes would be cut in future re-runs.

But even with threats of a penalty, activists say directors and producers are often reluctant to bring about change, particularly because soap operas depicting sexual violence, nicknamed “slap and kiss,” have consistently brought in higher ratings.

“Most television soap operas are adapted from famous old novels containing rape storylines in which female protagonists are raped by male protagonists,” says Jaray Singhakowinta, professor of sexuality studies at Bangkok’s National Institute of Development Administration. “Some of them are so popular that they have been made into movies and television soap operas more than 10 times since the 1970s.”

Singhakowinta says producers often justify rape storylines as a mere reflection of the real world. Some even argue that watching these scenes “offers a symbolic escape” to those who might commit rape, he says, a theory he vehemently rejects.

“The media’s excessive reproduction of rape rather informs female audiences that men’s sexual aggression is normal, and to an extent acceptable,” Singhakowinta says. “Media producers never include a legal consequence of rape.”

According to Thailand’s National Research Institute, about 30,000 rape cases are reported each year. Naiyana Supapueng, head of the Teeranat Kanjanauaksorn Foundation, a gender equality group, has predicted the real number is probably 10 times official figures, as most rape cases never reach the legal system.

Several factors stop women in Thailand from reporting rape, including community pressure. The Pavena Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for the rights of women and children, said that of the 656 cases they worked with in 2015, most of the victims were raped by stepfathers, friends or neighbors.

Thailand also struggles with a male-dominated legal system, few female police officers and a blame culture. “Rape has not been on the priority list of criminal cases that police officers will take seriously or investigate, unlike drug-related crimes or homicide,” says Yupa Phusahas, program officer at international development organization The Asia Foundation.

Victims who do report the crime often have to walk into all-male police stations and face unsympathetic questioning about what they were wearing, what they did to provoke the attacker and why they were out late.

There is even a grey area over the linguistics. In the Thai language, two words can describe a rape: bplum, which means “wrestling” and can also refer to forced sex that ends in a relationship, and khom kheun, which is used to describe rape as a criminal act.

Last year, the government launched a campaign to teach schoolgirls self-defense and dispense advice on how to protect themselves from sexual harassers. But sex education in schools remains limited. A UNICEF study released this year found that up to 41 percent of male school students in Thailand have “problematic attitudes” toward gender and sexuality, while most teachers do not receive training on approaching topics such as sexual rights, gender and violence.

Critics say the portrayal of rape in popular culture is a sign of ongoing gender inequality in Thai society. “The roots of the problem cover all institutions,” says Matcha Phorn-in, director of Thai-based rights organization Sangsan Anakot Yawachon. “We need to change the mindset of society and give out new messages, and we need to send these messages into families, the education sector and the media. We need a justice system that will make sure there is justice for women as well as men.

“When it comes to violence in these soap operas, it’s not just about rape. It’s about the broader issue of who controls the system.”

‘Hate Crime’ Call for Corrective Rape Receives Boost in South Africa

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Jen Thorpe

Six years after the South African government promised to address violence toward the LGBTIQ community, a hate crimes bill was opened for public comment this month – but the struggle to ensure lesbians enjoy a life free from violence is not over, say activists.

One night earlier this month, a lesbian couple were sleeping at home after having returned from a music festival in Nelspruit, Mpumalanga, in eastern South Africa. They were woken by loud noises outside. Shortly after, a group of men kicked down their door, entered the house and demanded sex.

“When I refused, one pushed me onto the bed, undressed and started to rape me,” one of the women later told a local newspaper. “Our cries fell on deaf ears as nobody came to our rescue.”

Both women were raped while the gang admonished them for being gay.

“They hurled insults at us and told us that they wanted to teach us … how it feels to be a woman,” said one of the women.

Corrective rape, the belief that heterosexual rape can “cure” or “correct” a woman’s homosexuality, is known to be common in South Africa, although the exact number of incidents is impossible to calculate. There is no separate category for corrective rape in the law, which means incidents are not officially recorded. Despite promises of a law to deal specifically with corrective rape in 2010, and years of pressure from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) groups in South Africa, activists say concrete government action has been slow to materialize.

Many are now calling for corrective rape to be legally recognized as a hate crime, along with other hate-motivated acts, which could force government institutions and the police to provide specific responses, such as gender sensitivity training for staff dealing with these crimes and enhanced sentencing for perpetrators. A law could also push authorities to come up with a standardized response to incident reports with an emphasis on better data collection and monitoring of hate crimes to measure the extent of the problem, and the subsequent allocation of appropriate resources to address it.

“Even though the term [corrective rape] is often used, no such legal category exists,” says Sanja Bornman, managing attorney of the Lawyers for Human Rights‘ Gender Equality Program and chairperson of the Hate Crimes Working Group.

“Activists are calling for a law that specifically recognizes the motive of hate, which makes these crimes different for several reasons, including the implicit threat to other lesbians within these communities,” says Bornman.

While a draft hate crimes bill was opened to public comment on October 19 and obliges police and judicial officials to take sexual orientation and gender identity into account when considering motive, Bornman says the process of having it officially signed into law will be lengthy.

In the meantime, the government is taking small steps to address the issue of corrective rape, but activists say these small successes are often marred by a lack of capacity. In 2011, a Change.org petition demanding the South African government take action to stop corrective rape, received over 170,000 signatures. The result was the formation of the National Task Team on LGBTIQ issues (NTT), a partnership between the government and civil society groups aimed at addressing hate crimes, among other issues.

“The NTT holds significant promise but is hampered by a lack of capacity and coordination, especially at the provincial level,” says Bornman.

The Department of Justice also established a Rapid Response Team to respond to hate crimes and to address the backlog of reported incidents of hate crimes being committed against LGBTIQ persons. But this team, too, is ineffective, say critics.

Historically, South Africa has taken a progressive approach to LGBTIQ issues in the law – it was one of the first countries in the world to protect the right of sexual orientation in its constitution, for example.

But activists argue that laws aren’t much of a deterrent in the context of South Africa’s patriarchal society. In a recent survey commissioned by the Other Foundation, an African Trust aiming at advancing freedom and equality in Africa, an estimated 450,000 South Africans reported they had physically harmed women who “dress and behave like men in public” in the previous 12 months, and 700,000 had verbally abused gender nonconforming people.

Violence against lesbians in South Africa is taking place against a backdrop of sexual violence and machismo culture. More than 50,000 sexual offenses have been reported to the police every year since the Sexual Offenses Act was passed in 2007, with a decline in reported sexual offenses in the past five years. The Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust attributed this decrease to reduced reporting rather than reduced incidence of rape, thus those figures might only reflect a small portion of the real number of offenses.

Cases of corrective rape are rarely reported and even more rarely result in a conviction. But when perpetrators are punished, those cases often illustrate the disconnect between the country’s progressive law and patriarchal reality. In 2008, national female football star Eudy Simelane was murdered just outside Kwa Thema in Johannesburg. Simelane, who had been a vocal advocate of LGBTIQ rights, had been gang raped, beaten and stabbed 25 times in the legs, face and chest. Simelane’s trial was the first related to the murder of a lesbian women to end in a conviction. But in his sentencing, the judge ruled that her sexual orientation did not play a role in her rape and murder.

For the new law on hate crimes to be successful in preventing crimes like corrective rape, Bornman believes much more needs to be done to educate the public “about what it means to be LGBTIQ, and to ensure that those who do violate rights must be held accountable more consistently.”

The Push to Get Every African Country to Criminalize Marital Rape

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Rumbi Chakamba

The U.N.’s Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women states that ‘violence against women shall be understood to encompass … marital rape.’ But spousal rape is still not recognized in the laws of more than half the countries in Africa.

According to the World Health Organization’s 2006 study on domestic violence, the most common form of violence against women is perpetrated by their intimate partners. But in many parts of Africa, the rape of a woman by her husband isn’t considered a crime.

In several countries, including Senegal and Botswana, there is no legislation dealing with the issue of spousal or marital rape, while in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya and other countries, the law protects conjugal rights, stating that rape can only occur outside of wedlock. While governments continue to turn a blind eye to marital rape, say activists, many women remain vulnerable to sustained abuse as their country’s laws fail to protect them.

The 2014 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey shows that 8 percent of women surveyed said they had experienced sexual violence from their husbands within the past year, while 14 percent reporting having experienced sexual violence from their partners at least once in their lifetime.

A policy brief on marital rape produced by the African Population Health Research Center for the Kenyan Parliament in 2010 highlighted the stories of various victims in a bid to conscientize legislators on the need for policy change. One was the story of 28-year-old Sally (not her real name), who is a client of the Women’s Rights Awareness Programme, an NGO that provides shelter, counseling and practical and legal advice to survivors of gender-based violence in Nairobi. She reported that she resisted having sex with her late husband because he “had signs” of a sexually transmitted disease, but he would force her. After her husband’s death, Sally went to a clinic to get tested and found out she was HIV-positive.

According to the World Bank Research on Women, Business and Law, only 14 countries in Africa have legislation in place that specifically criminalizes marital rape. While it is possible for women to file complaints in most of the countries that do not specifically criminalize rape, in eight states husbands are exempt from facing criminal penalties for forcing their wives to have sex with them.

Until recently, Malawi was one of the African states where the law was silent on marital rape. Activists in the country have long been fighting to have the act recognized as a crime. In 2001, rights group Women in Law in Southern Africa-Malawi (WILSA-Malawi) drafted a bill on marital rape which sparked fierce public debate. But the debate was eventually shut down by a judge who said such a law would go against one of the basic foundations of marriage. “By entering into marriage, each spouse is taken to have consented to sexual intercourse with the other spouse during the existence of his or her marriage,” Supreme Court Judge Duncan Tambala told reporters at the time.

Now, after 15 years of campaigning, WILSA Malawi National Coordinator Mzati Mbeko says the group can claim a small victory with the introduction of the Marriage, Divorce and Family Relations Bill 2015. While the bill reaffirms conjugal rights in marriage, it also spells out exceptions where a spouse may refuse to have sex “on reasonable grounds.” According to the bill, those grounds include poor health, recovery after giving birth, recovery after surgery and “if he/she has reasonable fear that engaging in sexual intercourse is likely to cause physical or psychological harm to either spouse.”

The bill also states that a husband can be convicted of marital rape for nonconsensual sex if he and his wife are separated at the time. Though Mbeko touts the bill as a much-needed first step, he is also quick to say that it does not do nearly enough to address the full scale of the problem. “We can now push full throttle for the recognition of marital rape within the law as it [marital rape] is a form of gender-based violence,” he says. “With no law, it will continue and women will continue to suffer.”

But getting lawmakers to take a stronger stand against non-consensual sex within marriage means overcoming deeply ingrained patriarchal and cultural beliefs. Annie Banda, a gender activist in Malawi who has been lobbying for the country to pass a marital rape law, says that in private discussions with various parliamentarians, she has been told that marital rape is simply not possible. “When you are outside the meeting rooms, they will tell you there is no way that a man can rape his own wife,” she says.

In Botswana, too, the attitude toward sex in marriage holds that women give up their individual rights once they enter wedlock. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior police officer in the Botswana Police Service confirms that he and his colleagues do not deal with marital rape cases. “We as the police cannot police in the bedroom,” he says. “How can you refuse to be with your own husband when you belong to him and expect us to intervene?”

Even in places where laws against marital rape exist, cultural beliefs make them difficult to enforce. South Africa was one of the first African countries to legislate against marital rape, in 1993, but research reveals that patriarchal attitudes still influence how the courts handle cases of marital rape. In its 2012 report on marital rape in South Africa, the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa documents one case where a judge dismissed marital rape charges because the husband’s “desire to make love to his wife must have overwhelmed him, hence his somewhat violent behavior.” In another case, the complainant was abducted and raped by her husband, who thought it was his right as she had not reimbursed him the lobolo (bride price) he had paid for her. In his ruling, the judge said that the defendant’s actions “though totally unacceptable in law … were shaped and molded by the norms, beliefs and customary practices by which he lived his life.”

Gender activist Annie Banda predicts a long road ahead in the fight to eradicate marital rape. “Marital rape is there, but people do not want to accept it,” she says. “The victims are complaining, but law enforcers still do not believe it is possible for a man to rape his wife, because of our culture.”

Forced Marriage and Rape: The Legacy of the Khmer Rouge on Trial

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Nina Teggarty

In Cambodia, the U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal hears from survivors of forced marriage, but critics say the court should also cover other acts of gender-based violence.

“I just couldn’t understand why falling in love was a crime,” says Youk Chhang, executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an organization that records atrocities that took place under the Khmer Rouge. From 1975–79, Pol Pot’s brutal regime devastated Cambodia, and an estimated 1.7 million people died from starvation or disease, or were executed.

The Khmer Rouge, known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), controlled every part of people’s lives, even love and sexuality. Chhang was only 15 when he witnessed the Khmer Rouge killing a couple because “they fell in love without permission.” To make sure Cambodians married the “right” people, namely those who were loyal to the party, the CPK forced men and women to marry each other.

Survivors of forced marriage are currently giving testimony in Case 002/02, the latest trial to take place at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Phnom Penh, otherwise known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC). Evidence of forced marriage will be used to determine if senior leaders of the regime committed crimes against humanity.

The Khmer Rouge used forced marriage to exact ultimate control over relationships, as couples were expected to procreate and produce the next generation of party adherents. No one knows how many people were forcibly married by “Angkar” (the communist party), but mass wedding ceremonies, some consisting of more than 100 couples, took place across Cambodia.

Survivors appearing before the court have described how the regime pressured them to marry. “I refused [to marry] several times, but finally the sector committee said I was a stubborn person,” Sa Lay Hieng said in court. Scared of being killed, Hieng was coerced into marrying a man she did not like. Another witness, who was granted anonymity, said she was made to marry a Khmer Rouge officer in a collective ceremony; when she refused his advances on their wedding night, her new spouse complained to his commander, who then raped her. “I had to bite my lip and shed my tears, but I didn’t dare to make any noise, because I was afraid I would be killed,” she said. She was eventually led back to her husband.

The final testimonies relating to forced marriage will be heard in the coming weeks. But some experts argue that other heinous sexual crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge era, such as rape outside of forced marriage, have been overlooked by the court.

In a study by the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization, an NGO that provides counseling to victims appearing before the court, a third of female interviewees witnessed rape outside forced marriage. This finding is echoed by the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has collected a “significant number of documents” detailing at least 156 cases of rape by Khmer Rouge comrades in cooperatives and detention centers. “The women who were raped were accused of having served in the CIA, KGB or other enemies of Angkar, and taken to be smashed [killed],” said Youk Chhang of the Documentation Center.

Farina So, an expert in gender-based violence perpetrated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea, says that “hundreds and hundreds” of rapes occurred, adding that cadres “used it as a tool to victimize women, to silence them.” In the course of her research, So has interviewed numerous survivors of sexual assault; one of these women, Tang Kim, was considered “an enemy of Angkar” and in 1976 was rounded up – along with eight other women – and readied for execution in Kampong Chhnang province, central Cambodia. While Kim awaited her fate, she could hear the other women being raped and then murdered – “I was terrified to see people being killed off and buried one by one” – recalls Kim in a film made by the Cambodian Documentation Center. She continues, “I saw a Khmer Rouge soldier slashing a woman’s abdomen; they cut it open and took out the fetus.” After being gang-raped by the soldiers, Kim managed to escape and went into hiding.

According to So, Kim tried to submit her civil party application to the Khmer Rouge tribunal, but it was rejected because prosecutors are addressing only sexual abuse within forced marriage. It was, says So, a decision that “really disappointed” Kim and other rape survivors, many of whom have spent decades summoning up the courage to speak about their ordeal.

When Women & Girls Hub approached the Khmer Rouge tribunal to ask why the current trial is focusing exclusively on forced marriage, the court’s spokesperson, Lars Olsen, said co-investigating judges had concluded that rape outside forced marriage was not an official policy of the Khmer Rouge. He pointed to this statement from the tribunal: “Those who were accused of ‘immoral’ behavior, including rape, were often re-educated or killed [so] it cannot be considered that rape was one of the crimes used by CPK leaders to implement the common purpose.”

The survivors and their lawyers, who campaigned for years to have forced marriage added to the list of crimes prosecuted in court, are waiting for the expected judgment in late 2017.