Violence against women Dawn Editorial
Thursday, 12 Aug, 2010
The latest figures on women victims of violence in Sindh released by the Aurat Foundation ought to do more than just remind us that thousands of women every year continue to be subjected to various forms of aggression and abuse in our country.
The figures — more than 1,175 in the first six months of 2010 — ought to shame the government into doing more in terms of legislation to help curb crimes and violations of the rights of women. No doubt some steps in the legislative arena have been taken. In January the president signed the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act upholding the dignity of women as their basic right. In March he signed the Protection against Harassment of Women at Work Place Act. However, there is still no law protecting women at home and from their family members, who very often are the main perpetrators of violence against them.
Legislation on domestic violence has been in the offing for six years now since the first bill on the subject was introduced in 2004. The closest the bill came to fruition as law was in August 2009 when the Domestic Violence (Protection and Prevention) Act was adopted by the National Assembly. Unfortunately, it was allowed to lapse when the Senate did not adopt it within the three-month mandatory period of it being approved by the lower house. The fact that it has not materialised into law so far can only be a stigma for parliament. Gender justice and protection initiatives are no doubt important. These would include the establishment of legal aid centres to help women who have been forced to leave their home, gender justice committees to help women get their rightful share of inheritance and advocacy programmes to help reduce honour killings. But equally if not more crucial is a protection law that gives women a level playing field in the domestic arena. Such a law will also bring us in line with a growing number of developing countries that have outlawed spousal abuse, and help society realise that violence against women is indeed a crime that must not go unpunished.
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Media blackout Dawn Editorial
Thursday, 12 Aug, 2010
Is is time the PPP’s Sindh leadership owned up to its petty war on Jang as well as Geo and ARY. While the channels are back on air, no sane mind will believe that the party workers acted on their own, pressured the cable operators to pull the plug and burnt copies of the paper without a wink from the party’s provincial hierarchy.
Though it was not countrywide and was confined to Karachi and parts of Sindh, the unannounced Geo and ARY blackout constituted an attack on press freedom and a slur on a party that is in power because the people voted for it. Its commitment to press freedom in the party’s foundation documents and its various election manifestoes is categorical. During the 2007 lawyers’ movement, especially after the Nov 3 emergency, when the Musharraf government ordered the banning of many channels and policemen ransacked TV offices, the PPP leaders were among those who criticised the military government’s war on the media and the harsh Pemra guidelines that followed. That the PPP should itself now persecute sections of the media is astonishing.
One may have reservations about the way some newspapers and channels have gone overboard about the Birmingham incident and reported the incident out of proportion. To that extent the PPP workers’ anger is understandable. But the best response would have been to ignore the aberration rather than impart new dimensions to the incident and create a crisis that turned out to be counterproductive for the party and the government. We demand that the PPP leaders restrain their workers and refrain from clamping down on the media in this manner in future. At a time when floods are ravaging the country, and hundreds of thousands are without food and shelter, the government should seek the media’s help for mobilising national and international efforts for mitigating their suffering instead of trying to intimidate it.