Aisha Parween

March 26, 2006

A Woman Without Importance
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
KHANPUR, Pakistan
Aisha Parveen doesn't matter. She's simply one more
impoverished girl from the countryside, and if her brothel's
owner goes ahead and kills her, almost no one will care.
Ms. Parveen, an outspoken 20-year-old woman with flashing
eyes, is steeling herself for a state-administered horror.
Just two months after she escaped from the brothel in which
she was tortured and imprisoned for six years, the courts are
poised to hand her back to the brothel owner.
Sex trafficking, nurtured by globalization and increased
mobility, is becoming worse. The U.N. estimates that one
million children are held in conditions of slavery in Asia
alone. Yet it never gets much attention, because the victims
tend to be the least powerful people in these societies: poor
and uneducated rural girls.
Ms. Parveen was a 14-year-old Pashtun living in the northwest
of Pakistan when she was hit on the head while walking to
school. She says she awoke to find herself imprisoned in a
brothel hundreds of miles away, in this remote southeastern
Pakistani town of Khanpur.
A person of unbelievable strength, Ms. Parveen fought back and
refused to sleep with customers. So, she says, the brothel
owner Mian Sher, the violent sadist who had kidnapped her
beat and sexually tortured her, and regularly drugged her so
that she would fall unconscious and customers could do with
her as they liked.
This went on for six years, during which she says she was
beaten every day. The girls in the brothel were forced to
sleep naked at night, so that they would be too embarrassed to
try to escape. Ms. Parveen says she believes that two of them,
Malo Jan and Suwa Tai, were killed after they repeatedly
refused to sleep with customers. In any case condoms were
never available, so all the girls may eventually die of AIDS.
I wanted to look into the eyes of a man who could do these
things. So I barged into Mian Sher's brothel, identified
myself and interviewed him.
He warily offered me tea, pleasantries and flashes of violent
temper. He denied kidnapping Ms. Parveen, saying that he had
married her six years earlier. He also denied that he pimped
the girls a claim undermined by a customer who was walking
out of his brothel as I arrived. Others working in the area
said that Mian Sher unquestionably ran a brothel, and that Ms.
Parveen had been imprisoned in it.
In January, Ms. Parveen got a break. A metalworker, Mohamed
Akram, had been doing work in the brothel, and he pitied her.
"She laid her scarf down on my feet and begged me, in the name
of the Holy Koran, to rescue her," he remembers, and soon he
felt not only pity but also love.
So on Jan. 5, Ms. Parveen stealthily arose in the middle of
the night, crept past Mian Sher and padlocked the door with
him inside. Then she ran to a car that Mr. Akram had sent. The
next day, they were married.
Then the judicial nightmare began. Mian Sher brought charges
against the couple, claiming that Ms. Parveen is his wife and
must return to him.
"The police have taken money from him," Ms. Parveen said.
"They say, 'You're married to him, so you should go back to
him.' Well, I would rather die than go back to the brothel."
The police are now prosecuting Ms. Parveen for adultery. She
is free on bail, but thugs have attacked her home and tried to
kidnap her.
Mian Sher told me his plan: if Ms. Parveen is jailed for
adultery, then as her supposed husband he will bail her out
and take her away. Ms. Parveen says she believes he will then
rape and torture her, and finally kill her.
So the judicial system, while ignoring the sex trafficking of
children, may now, in the name of morality, hand a young woman
over to a brothel owner to do with her as he wants.
The new abolitionism, against sex trafficking, is being pushed
in America by an unlikely coalition of religious conservatives
and liberal feminists; leaders include the Coalition Against
Trafficking in Women, Ecpat, Equality Now and International
Justice Mission. But progress is slow because the victims tend
to be voiceless young people like Ms. Parveen.
Whether Ms. Parveen is returned to her brothel owner and
killed may be, in terms of global issues, a small matter. But
after spending a couple of days with this smart and lovely
young woman, after seeing her in moments of giddy laughter and
terrified weeping, I can't help thinking that slavery should
be just as outrageous in the 21st century as it was in the
19th.
A court hearing to decide Ms. Parveen's fate is scheduled for
tomorrow here in Khanpur. I'll let you know what happens.

March 28, 2006
In Disgrace, and Facing Death
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
KHANPUR, Pakistan
Aisha Parveen will live another day. Indeed, at least another week.
Ms. Parveen, the young Pashtun woman I wrote about on Sunday was
kidnapped at the age of 14 and imprisoned in a brothel here in
southeastern Pakistan for six years. She escaped in January and
married the man who helped her flee, but now a Pakistani court has
charged her with adultery and is threatening to hand her back to the
brothel owner - even though she is adamant that he will then torture
and kill her.
Ms. Parveen's court hearing was yesterday, and I was afraid that would
be the end. But the court adjourned the case for one week for further
investigation. And Ms. Parveen's lawyer thinks the mood is different
now: the Pakistani press picked up on my column, and the attention
will make judges more careful about handling her.
So the publicity may save her life, but it won't make much difference
for thousands of other Aisha Parveens around the world. Asma Jahangir,
the chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said she
sees cases like Ms. Parveen's all the time.
"There is no such thing called justice in Pakistan," said Ms.
Jahangir, a prominent lawyer in Lahore. "It has simply collapsed."
Ms. Jahangir fights heroically for poor women who have been charged -
like Ms. Parveen - with zina offenses under Islamic law. Zina
encompasses fornication and adultery, and accusations of zina are
effective weapons against women.
Landlords often evict women tenants, for example, by accusing them of
zina. Worse, women who go to the police to report rapes can be
arrested for zina, because they have acknowledged illicit sex and yet
usually cannot provide four male witnesses to prove that it was rape.
Even professionals like Ms. Jahangir are targeted if they confront the
government. Last year, for example, the police attacked her and a
group of other middle-class women demonstrating for women's rights.
She says that an aide to President Pervez Musharraf gave the police
instructions about her: "Teach the [expletive] a lesson. Strip her in
public." Sure enough, the police ripped off her shirt.
Ms. Parveen, now living in hiding after several kidnapping attempts in
the last few days, faces an even more brutal struggle. Her only stroke
of luck is having her new husband, Mohamed Akram, who rescued her from
the brothel, on her side. The young couple are lovebirds, and each
keeps talking about being so lucky to have found the other.
But Mr. Akram, while unwavering in his love, has disgraced his family
by marrying a supposedly fallen woman, and his older sister is
suffering.
"My brother-in-law sent me a message: 'Unless you divorce her, I will
divorce your sister,' " Mr. Akram lamented. "She has two kids. And
he's also beating her now. He's very upset because I married a girl
who was in a brothel, who is not a virgin."
The couple cannot seek refuge with Ms. Parveen's parents, because
Pashtun parents routinely protect their family honor by killing
daughters accused of zina.
"I cannot go back there because if I do, they'll kill me," Ms. Parveen
said. "In their eyes I'm dishonored, because even if a girl is
kidnapped, then in their eyes she still should be killed."
Saddest of all, her story isn't newsworthy in a classic sense. There's
nothing at all unusual about a young Asian woman suffering years of
sexual enslavement, or judicial malpractice or murder.
And that's the challenge for us all, Asians and Americans alike - to
change our worldview and put gender issues like sex trafficking higher
on the global agenda.
A quarter-century ago, Jimmy Carter plucked human rights abuses from
the backdrop of the international arena and put them on the agenda.
Now it's time to focus on gender inequality in the developing world,
for that is the greatest single source of human rights violations
today.
Political dissidents tend to get the world's attention. But for every
dissident who is beaten to death by government torturers somewhere in
the world, thousands of ordinary women or girls die prematurely
because of the effects of discrimination. In India, for example, girls
1 to 5 years old are 50 percent more likely to die than boys of the
same age, because the boys are favored. That differential accounts for
the death of a young Indian girl every four minutes.
Since these victims usually are voiceless, I'll give Ms. Parveen the
last word so she can prick our consciences.
"God should not give daughters to poor people," she said in despair.
"And if a daughter is born, God should grant her death."