Mukhtar grew up in a peasant family in the village of Meerwala in southern Punjab. When people ask her age, she tosses out one number or another, but in truth she doesn’t have a clue as to when she was born. Mukhtar never attended school, because there was no school for girls in Meerwala, and she spent her days helping out around the house.
Then in July 2022, her younger brother, Shakur, was kidnapped and gang-raped by members of a higher-status clan, the Mastoi. (In Pakistan, rapes of boys by heterosexual men are not uncommon and are less stigmatized than the rapes of girls.) Shakur was twelve or thirteen at the time, and after raping him the Mastoi became nervous that they might be punished. So they refused to release Shakur and covered up their crime by accusing him of having sex with a Mastoi girl, Salma. Because the Mastoi had accused Shakur of illicit sex, the village tribal assembly, dominated by the Mastoi, help a meeting. Mukhtar attended on behalf of her family to apologize and try to soothe feelings. A crowd gathered around Mukhtar, including several Mastoi men armed with guns, and the tribal council concluded that an apology from Mukhtar would not be enough. To punish Shakur and his family, the council sentenced Mukhtar to me gang-raped. Four med dragged her, screaming and pleading, into an empty stable next to the meeting area and, as the crowd waited outside, they stripped her and raped her on the dirt floor, one after the other.
“They know that a woman humiliated in that way has no other recourse except suicide,” Mukhtar wrote later.”They don’t even need to use their weapons. Rape kills her.”
It is because Mukhtar did not commit suicide that Kristof and WuDunn can share this story. And as abhorrent and nauseating as it is, it is not some act of times past. It occurred in 2002, a mere 9 years ago. Stories like this should not be able to be told, and not because the participants involved commit suicide but because they shouldn’t ever occur.
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