[The prime minister’s office said at the time that Khan’s comments had been “distorted to mean something that he never intended.” Asked this past week about his April remarks, however, Khan doubled down.]
In an interview with Axios earlier
this week, Imran Khan was asked about whether there was a “rape epidemic” in
Pakistan, where advocates believe that a large number of assaults go
unreported. “If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on
the man unless they are robots. I mean, it’s common sense,” he responded.
Women in Pakistan responded by sharing photographs of the “modest”
clothing that they were wearing when they were sexually harassed, as well as
anecdotes about inappropriate behavior they have encountered — such as unwanted
touching — even when conservatively dressed in traditional headscarves and
shalwar kameez. At a protest Saturday in Karachi, women were encouraged to bring a piece of clothing that they or
an acquaintance had been wearing when they were subjected to sexual violence.
“This is dangerously simplistic and
only reinforces the common public perception that women are ‘knowing’ victims
and men ‘helpless’ aggressors,” the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and
more than a dozen other civil society groups said in a statement. “For
the head of government — a government that claims to defend the rights of women
and vulnerable groups — to insist on this view is simply inexcusable.”
It’s the second time in recent
months that Khan — who was one of Pakistan’s top cricket players and a national
celebrity before he entered politics — has come under fire for his comments about rape. During a
live television broadcast in April, he replied to a question about a perceived
rise in sexual assaults by saying that the traditional custom of “purdah,” or
modesty, was intended to “stop temptation.”
“Not every man has willpower. If
you keep on increasing vulgarity, it will have consequences,” Khan said.
The prime minister’s office said at
the time that Khan’s comments had been “distorted to mean something that he
never intended.” Asked this past week about his April remarks,
however, Khan doubled down.
When Axios journalist Jonathan Swan
noted that the prime minister had been accused of “victim-blaming,” Khan deemed
the controversy to be “nonsense.”
“We don’t have discos here. We
don’t have nightclubs,” he said in the Tuesday interview. “So it is a
completely different society, a way of life here. So, if you raise temptation
in the society to the point, and all these young guys have nowhere to go, it
has consequences on the society.”
Pressed on whether women’s clothing
was responsible for provoking sexual violence, Khan declined to rule out the
possibility. “It depends which society you live in,” he said. “If
in a society, people haven’t seen that sort of thing, it will have an impact on
them.”
Official statistics suggest that
close to a dozen rapes are reported in Pakistan each day. But activists say
that the vast majority of sexual assaults are never reported because of the
likelihood that victims will be blamed for the attacks, or even killed for
bringing shame to their families. Some high-profile cases have sparked anger
and mass demonstrations, including the 2020 rape of a woman who was stranded on
a deserted highway with her children at night, then blamed by police for
putting herself in a dangerous situation.
Khan’s latest remarks have led some
men in Pakistan to proudly declare themselves to be robots, a joking reference
to the prime minister’s claim that seeing a woman who is not modestly dressed
“will have an impact on the man unless they are robots.”
Sherry Rehman, a senator from the
opposition Pakistan People’s Party, questioned whether Khan meant to apply the
term to “all the men who are civilized in their behavior and interactions with
women.” She added sarcastically that she didn’t realize Pakistan “had such a
large AI population.”
Jemima Goldsmith, a British film
producer who was married to Khan for nearly a decade, expressed a sense of
exhaustion. “And again. Sigh,” she wrote on Twitter, sharing a story about the harassment that
even fully veiled women in Saudi Arabia face, which she first posted in April
after her ex-husband’s comments on modest dress went viral.
While government officials have
again claimed that the prime minister’s remarks are being taken out of context,
prominent female politicians and activists have publicly condemned his remarks.
“Makes my heart shudder to think
how many rapists feel validated today with the Prime Minister backing their
crime,” Kanwal Ahmed, a prominent advocate for women’s rights in
Pakistan, wrote
on Twitter.
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