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■"The 11-Year-Old Wife," op-ed by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times , 21 June 2005, p. A23.
Nick Kristof claims that two women die each day in Pakistan from honor killings (basically sex outside the marriage getting you killed in today's version of stonings, which, sometimes are still stonings). It's one of those factoids you want to resist embracing, because it's so hard to verify.
But there's no denying Pakistan's "hudood laws," which Kristof says have been used to imprison "thousands of women who report rapes." Here's the amazing standard: to verify a rape a women needs to have four male witnesses to the act. Sounds like a good-old-rapist-boys law that makes it impossible to ever catch one after the fact. The catch 22 is obvious: you can't get the four witnesses, so you, the woman, go to jail for admitting having "illicit sex." If there is a better way to scare females from ever reporting rapes, I haven't heard it. Such laws have the effect of making rape legal in the society. So if a woman gets too uppity in the business world or in family life or in stirring up trouble in general, you rape her and knock her off her stride. And if she complains she lands in jail.
Kristof tells the story of women in Pakistan who demonstrated for equal rights. They were clubbed by police and dragged to the station. The ringleader's fate was to be stripped naked in public.
Pakistanis are rightfully resentful that such headlines are the main depictions of their society in the West, but they should target their own political system for that anger. Bad people doing bad things will happen anywhere, but bad laws that let them get away with it tend to be defining features of the Gap, not the Core.
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