Family values
A horror out of Karachi: a pair of teenage neighbors tried to run away together from their poor neighborhood of Ali Brohi Goth, and were murdered by their male relatives. First the 15-year-old girl, Bakhtaja, was tied down and electrocuted, and the next day it was 18-year-old Ghani’s turn.
His father finished dinner, then returned. With the help of an uncle, he strapped his son to a rope bed, tying one arm and one leg to the frame with uncovered electrical wires.
Bakhtaja had endured 10 minutes of searing electrical jolts before she died. The boy took longer, and eventually the uncle stepped in and strangled him. The couple were buried in the dead of night.
You’d think parental love would be a lot stronger than whatever brew of religion and custom and fear of the neighbors inspired that family holocaust, but there it is. Two fathers tortured their children to death for unlicensed sex.
“There are pockets in Karachi where tribal culture is being followed but we had no idea it was to this extent,” said Mahnaz Rahman, resident director of Auraf Foundation, a women’s rights group. Outside a secularised middle class, some communities are becoming more entrenched in their conservative values, she said.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has reported an average of 650 “honour” killings annually over the past decade. But since most go unreported, the real number is likely to be much higher.
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Ghani had tried several times to get permission to marry her, but was rebuffed. Eventually, the pair fled, with cash and jewellery she had stashed away.
They had made it to Hyderabad, three hours west, when Bakhtaja’s father called and said the families had agreed to the marriage and would let them return safely. It was a trick.
The fathers had, in fact, come to a settlement. Muhammad Afzal, Ghani’s father, had pledged to give Hikmat Khan, Bakhtaja’s father, two of his own daughters, a cow, and PKR 500,000 (£3,538) for the wedding. They meant to keep the agreement a secret.
But an older relative, Sirtaj Khan, got wind of the deal and exposed it to the community, insisting that the couple be put to death. Instead of braving the supposed public embarrassment, the fathers agreed with Khan to make an example of their children.
I wonder what the lives of those two daughters, the ones who weren’t “given” to Hikmat Khan after all, will be like.
Bakhtaja and Ghani are buried 10 metres apart in the local cemetery, their graves dug between shrubs and covered with red cloth still not faded by the sun and dust. Ataullah, a gravedigger, said the bodies were charred from burns when they were lowered into the ground.
Female relatives of the couple, who were not available for interviews, were “removed” from their houses when punishments were meted out, neighbours said. After the murder, Bakhtaja’s mother told human rights defenders: “I forgive him,” meaning her husband.
“The women are vulnerable and scared. They want their men back,” said Rahman, of Aurat Foundation. The arrest of the culprits left the women without financial support. Yet they don’t seem to condone the actions of their husbands.
I guess that answers my question.
God is great.
God hates women.
For far too many women in “tribal” cultures marriage is what, in other circumstances, we would term “survival sex”. They have no other opportunities or choices – and we all know that under those conditions most of us prefer to think we have an agency that we actually don’t have. What can those poor mothers do? They either internalise the values and actions of their husbands and their local culture, or they lose all and any means of support, their family, their friends, and their other children.
Of course, this has underlain the official institution of marriage for most of history.
Steamshovelmama, I was watching a left/right discussion on TV last night (the left winger spent more time agreeing with the right winger than proposing his own views!) in which the right winger was talking about the most important things we need to be doing to save this country. One of those was marriage. He then made the statement that marriage was a separate issue from his other important thing, the economy (free market, of course). I nearly dropped the laptop, I was so horrified by such an incredibly inaccurate statement going so completely unchallenged by anyone…but, I suppose few people are aware of the economic underpinnings of marriage. Most people I know think it is either God-given or just a natural state of affairs among human beings.
Yes, I’ve seen that attitude as well. I think you have to have some understanding of the Marxist analysis of class, race and gender to understand how economics, particularly as capitalism became the dominant economic system, underlies the some of the institutions people see as being eternally immutable. Of course, that type of analysis is currently not fashionable amongst the left…
Of course, the problem with sex and the relationships between the sexes is that there probably is a biological underpinning for what we think of as romantic or marital relationships. The male-female pair bond seems to be an almost universal model for rearing children – even in cultures where polyandry or polygyny are the norm they still tell stories based around what we would call romantic love. Having said that, it seems clear that serial monogamy is far commoner than the “till death do us part” marital model.
It does make sense that a basic pair bond between a father and mother would facilitate the successful rearing of children, especially as that pair bond actually does cement the children into two extended families where there is support for the parents (rearing kids has always been emotionally and economically costly) and where multiple adults have a vested interest in those kids specifically.
Now, I’m not saying that’s the only successful way to raise children. That’s no more true than suggesting that gay couples’ relationships are somehow “inferior” because biologically the human race is geared towards heterosexual sex. Humans are complex and our brains have a high degree of plasticity. There are a multitude of ways that culture or our “extelligence” can overlie basic biological drives. These basic biological drives or relationships are not present in every human everywhere. And, obviously, “natural” does not necessarily mean “good” or “helpful”. But it’s usually a good idea to be aware of what might be going on on the depths of out brains.
Now I’m a happily cohabiting woman currently with the expectation that my relationship (in its 27th year) is most likely to last until one of us shuffles off this mortal coil. We’ve raised two kids. So I’m not going trash marriage as a whole… but we’re economic equals in this relationship. If I needed to I could go and only be slightly worse off than him (yes, he earns more than me. I had two kids. That’s the way society ain’t set up to treat women equally). When my children were young I could have gone. And my culture acknowledges my right to do so with little more than the odd bit of tut-tutting but that is down to feminism.
In not so distant past women were not much better off than those poor women in Karachi. The only way you had economic security was via a man. And once you had a man you would lose everything if you left, security, income, a roof over your head, your children, whom you probably love, your family because they would be shamed… None of this has any part of any biological bond to facilitate child survival. This is about what is a genteel (mostly) form of slavery. And, like all slavery, it exists for economic reasons. The reproductive work done by women actually enables the economic system of the owning and retaining of wealth by certain families
Obviously (and I realise I’m preaching to the converted here!) the only way that this kind of slavery can work – where half the population are subjugated and live and work in what is both partnership and economic subjugation to the other half – is by training them to internalise the values that promote that subjugation. You take a basic biological fact and weave a set of cultural tropes and rules around them. You take a biological bond that may only last for 7 or 8 years – until the children are semi-independent – and you say this bond is the ultimate aim for every woman. That it will last forever and is the greatest source of happiness for everyone – but especially her. And gradually that cultural myth becomes rigidly internalised until it is unthinkable that things should be any other way.
Mill is very good on the subject of that training.
The part that horrifies me most (as if I can pick just one) is the extent to which these men went out of their way to torture their victims. They might, I suppose, have sincerely believed that Bakhtaja and Ghani should be murdered but electrocution? Deliberately making it as painful and horrific as possible? Setting up an actual torture chamber?
It suggests that ‘just’ killing them would not have been sufficient for a community baying for blood. Piety wins over humanity yet again.
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