Mukthar Mai's blog has been making waves in the news. A young pakistani woman from a remote village, she was gang raped. Her attackers were meting out justice. In a patriarchal conservative culture like hers a woman's honor or izzat is her sole possession. Once lost, there is little left to live for. A BBC reporter transcribes her story into an Urdu language blog. Here are the first, second and the most recent excerpts of her story. To truly comprehend what her action means, consider this story of young Afghan women committing suicide by setting themselves on fire to escape from lives of sexual, physical and other abuse.
posted on Nov 15, 2006 - View this thread

Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani woman raped by village order, is now in Madison, Wisconsin, at the invitation of Glamour Magazine, to receive an award honoring her struggle for women's rights. Nicholas Kristof, of the New York Times, broke her story to the world, calling her "one of the gutsiest people on Earth." She is in the United States despite an attempt by President Pervez Musharraf to bar her from traveling, because the visit might tarnish the country's image. Her "crime" was previously discussed on MetaFilter.
posted on Oct 26, 2005 - View this thread

Raped, Kidnapped and Silenced. "Indeed, on Friday, just as all this was happening, President Bush received Pakistan's foreign minister in the White House and praised President Musharraf's "bold leadership."" [an update to a previous MeFi thread]
posted on Jun 17, 2005 - View this thread

The NYT op-ed piece about Mukhtar Mai caught my eye. Tribal elders in Pakistan had her gang-raped in order to shame her family and thus restore the offended tribe's honor. Instead of staying quite or committing suicide, she went and opened a school in her village. Now her life is in danger again.This has been covered around the world. And you can help too. Follow up from this post.
posted on Mar 5, 2005 - View this thread

Pakistani council aproves rape to avenge honour. "A village council in Pakistan permitted a landlord to rape the sister and sister-in-law of a man he accused of an illicit relationship with his daughter, police said Thursday. (...) The council members, all of them landlords themselves, ruled that Ghaffar, who uses only one name, could avenge his honour by having sex with the farmer's daughter, who is 16, and daughter-in-law, who is 22." (BBC version here). "An estimated 80 percent of women prisoners in Pakistan are in jail because they failed to prove rape charges".
posted on May 6, 2004 - View this thread

Justice. Remember the case of the woman in rural Pakistan that was sentenced by a "tribal court" to be gang-raped? Four of the rapists and two of the tribal councillors were sentenced to death today for the crime. Some others were sentenced to life imprisonment. "There's nothing to celebrate," said the victim after hearing of the verdict. "Whatever punishment they got is because of their crime."
posted on Sep 2, 2002 - View this thread

"Boy's walk with upper caste girl led to trial and punishment"
From the newspaper article that is scanned and posted on the blog:

The girl was raped by four men as hundreds of villagers stood outside laughing and cheering, and was then forced to return home naked while dozens of villagers watched.

The sentence was ordered to shame the family after the girl's younger brother was seen walking unchaperoned with a girl from a higher-class tribe.
posted on Jul 4, 2002 - View this thread