Does a 5-year-old rape victim have a future to look forward to?

Rape is the responsibility of the perpetrator, not the victim. The 5-year-old girl's rape is a proof of this.

She was just five-years-old. She still had many more years to go before she was meant to discover that the world is not a nice place and that heinous crimes are committed against innocent people. That life is unfair and some people have to bear more pain than others. That being a girl means what is between her legs would define her entire existence. It was too soon for her to know about all this.

On the evening of September 12, 2013, a five-year-old girl’s right to dream was taken away from her – an evening where her usual plans would have included going to her friend’s home to stitch clothes for her doll or to cook small rotis to be served in her tiny toy cutlery. However, that evening robbed her of her innocence.

It makes me sick to imagine what growing up in Pakistan will be like for her now.

The stigma, the trauma, the misery of an innocent victim; she has too big a burden awaiting her. While her parents, doctors and the people are praying for her to get well soon, I can’t help praying for her future.

I can’t help thinking about what this society would do to her. Would her life, ten years from now, allow her to be glad that she survived? That she got well soon? In a society obsessed with marriage and virginity, how will this little girl pave her way to a normal life, let alone a good one? These are the questions that haunt me and I am sure they haunt her mother too – who is begging the media to respect the child’s right to anonymity, every second now.

A society where the woman is held responsible for provoking the crime against her, how does that society make sense of paedophilia and of this heart-shaking incident?

A woman in a chaadar is no less likely to be raped than a woman without one. A woman who dresses in a modern* way, is NOT giving an invitation to be raped and this is what our society needs to learn. Because a five-year-old, who is not capable of inviting her rapist, was raped. Because we have seen how this disease develops when we ignore the criminal and blame the victim. We have this to deal with now.

A professor of mine once proclaimed in a class on Ethics that an idea is the most powerful tool there is. An idea can construct or destruct an entire people. It is nothing but an abstract idea which sets in motion an atrocious genocide and it is nothing but an idea which fuels an uprising. Ideas are viral and ideas are powerful. It’s time that we use an idea to protect our women and children against rape.

The idea that no woman asks to be raped needs to be instilled. That rape, like murder, is the responsibility of the perpetrator rather than the victim. That the society needs to punish the offender and not the offended, the stigma is to be attached with the rapist and not the victim.

Let’s think about this idea and talk about it, for the sake of this five-year-old. Let’s make growing up for her easier and less painful.

*The author has deliberately used this word in its largely misused context, whereby modern entails Western, a concept which is largely at odds with the true philosophical essence of modernity