Last week honour was restored to the people of Ubaro in the interior of Sindh. An influential town member's female relative had eloped with a young man of her choosing. The family, faced with the heinous shame of a love marriage, decided that their honour must be avenged at all costs. Eleven men accosted a 16-year-old cousin of the man who had besmirched their family name and gang raped her repeatedly. Once they were done, their honour intact, they paraded their teenage victim naked around the village. The police in Ubaro Town arrested five out of the eleven men, but refused to file charges of rape against them. The Asian Human Rights Commission reported that local doctors were pressured by the influential family to falsify the medical records so that no trace of their honourable act would remain.

Mukhtaran Mai, ganged-raped on by the orders of a Punjabi jirga in 2002, spoke out on behalf of victims of violence in Pakistan warning that "such inhuman acts are increasing in Pakistan as the government is not sincere about punishing offenders". According to the Ansar Burney Trust (ABT), 70 per cent of Pakistani women are victims of domestic violence. While we have our own vocabulary detailing the many kinds of violence that can be inflicted on women -- karo kari, vani or child marriages, watta satta or bride bartering -- the rise of sexual violence inflicted on women, often on the grounds of reclaiming honour which is metaphysically manifested in the body, is beyond belief. The ABT estimates that as many as eight women, half of them minors, are raped everyday and notes that 4,383 women have been victims of honour killings in the last four years.

Western human rights groups are prone to point fingers at 'traditional culture' or local religion as allowing and even condoning the rampancy of sexual violence in Pakistan, but before I supply my own culprit let me just respond to the usual suspects. Culture is not static; it is fluid and constantly changing and Islam simply has nothing to do with the matter. If we have to point a finger at something, if we are to understand the sanctioning of violence towards women in our society, there is nowhere else to look but the Hudood Ordinance.

Prior to the implementation of the Hudood laws in 1979 by the congenitally barbaric Ziaul Haq, Pakistan's penal code did not label fornication a crime. Adultery and pre-marital sex were personal sins, not national ones. The pre-Zia legal code had provisions for dealing with the crime of rape, including marital rape, and viewed rape itself as a crime where the rapist, and not the victim, was indicted and prosecuted. The Hudood Ordinances, part of the military regime's utterly repugnant and ignorant Islamisation programme, introduced a compilation of laws dealing with rape -- which stipulates that the victim will be prosecuted alongside the rapist for engaging in sexual intercourse with a man who is not her husband --along with the crimes of adultery, fornication, and prostitution.

Moreover, the ordinance stipulated that a person could be "found guilty with or without the consent of the other party" which means that women, due to medical evidence, were more likely to be convicted under the Hudood Ordinances than men. If a woman wanted to prove rape, she had to provide four male witnesses to the crime, all of whom had to be 'good Muslims' (which begs the question: what were they doing watching a rape if they are such pious men?)

In 1983 Lal Mai from Liaqatabad was the first woman to be publicly flogged on adultery charges under the Hudood Ordinance. Newspaper reports from the time indicated that 8,000 men witnessed Mai receive her 15 lashes. Is that the dignity the Hudood Ordinances grants women? Is that proof of the 'protection' the sadistic ordinances were claimed to offer women?

The Women's Bill of 2006 only enshrines the violence of the Hudood Ordinance by giving it a cosmetic makeover and making it more palatable to the public at large. Its changes include cutting the crime for 'lewd behaviour' from death down to five years and a $200 fine. Women can still be accused of adultery and judges are left to decide how to proceed with the filing of a rape case, though those four good Muslim men are no longer required as witnesses. The Women's bill does nothing to ensure the safety of a rape victim nor does it do away with the fact that a woman can be prosecuted for engaging in consensual sexual relations. It is best described as the Hudood Ordinances: the remix.

The uproar around the passing of the bill was an exercise in the ridiculous. Women tore up drafts of the bill and screamed that they would not live in a society ungoverned by the Hudood Ordinances, while men, such as Maulana Fazlur Rahman, lambasted the bill for turning Pakistan into a "free sex zone". Nowhere, not once, did anyone mention Lal Mai. No one, not one parliamentarian, spoke of Mukhtaran Mai and how a proposed amendment could protect women like her from gang rape or acid burnings or karo kari. But why would they have?

After all it was General Musharraf, your president, who told the Washington Post last year that there was no such thing as rape in Pakistan; women only feigned rape to get Canadian visas and international asylum. Case closed. Not a single draft was brought to the floor of the parliament that suggested that women victims of sexual violence were not the enemy, but that the men, who beat, raped, or tortured them were. No change will make the Hudood Ordinance more acceptable to women. As long as we have to turn to a legal document as devoid of justice and equality as the Hudood Ordinance, no progress can be made on behalf of the rights of women.

One of the greatest crimes committed by our last woman prime minister, and she has many to her credit, was to safeguard the abhorrent Hudood Ordinances. Its very existence transforms women's bodies into the location of honour and punishment and has created the political and legal foundations for women to be the greatest recipient of violence in our society.

*Source Unknown*