Dua Zehra: Consent, choice and victim blaming
https://arab.news/65qdc
Passing judgment is easy when a matter is black and white; one can take sides with ease while being wrapped in the warm glow of moral certainty. But when a situation seemingly descends into the murky realms of the grey, as the Dua Zehra case has, things get a little more complicated.
On April 16, Dua’s parents filed a police report claiming that the then 13-year-old had been kidnapped after leaving the house to take out the garbage, and the case quickly became viral on social media, with the pleas of her distraught parents widely circulated and shared.
Outrage ensued and pressure was mounted on the authorities to recover this girl before she became another tragic statistic, another entry into the large and growing list of Pakistan’s missing children.
But then evidence began to emerge that there was more to the story. CCTV footage showed Dua standing on a road near her house carrying a bag and then willingly getting into a van. An unsigned nikah-nama started doing the rounds on social media claiming Dua was 18 years old and had married a man named Zaheer. When police raided the given address, they found no such persons there.
After some false starts, Dua was located in Okara and taken into custody along with Zaheer, the young man she says she’s married of her own free will. Dua also said her parents used to beat her and were forcing her to marry a man of their choice. She claimed she was 18 years old (documents provided by her parents say otherwise) and that her father and cousin arrived in Lahore where she was living with Zaheer just two days after the police report was filed and attempted to take her back by force. While her parents deny this, we do not yet know the truth.
What is undeniable however, is that there is something in our national character that is, for lack of a better term, schizophrenic. And so, from outrage to concern, the pendulum of public opinion swung all the way to victim-blaming.
Though a little parental paranoia may be a good thing, we must understand that taking away a child’s communication devices is the easier thing to do. It’s infinitely harder and much more important to be able to communicate with your child.
Zarrar Khuhro
Here we must realise that, for all her claims, Dua is still a legal minor and despite the tendency to think of underage girls as adults who are fully capable of making reasoned and rational decisions (especially when it comes to marriage) we must acknowledge that this is not the case. We do not, for example, apply the same standard to underage boys for the most part and it is somewhat surreal to see that people who may not trust a 13-year-old boy to go and buy groceries are now defending the right of a 13-year-old girl to elope and marry. It’s also an irony that the same girls we feel should not be educated about consent and relationships, are expected to be fully capable of taking such momentous decisions. Dua is a child who has made a mistake that may haunt her for the rest of her life, and this society is particularly unforgiving when it comes to girls.
But what is it that would possess a child to take such extreme steps? Granted, she was certainly groomed and seduced by the boy she chose to run away with, but such things do not happen in a vacuum. One aspect that we must consider is that most girls in this country are generally kept cloistered, and forbidden even casual and healthy social interactions with boys their age. Given that we, as a society, consider girls to be the torch-bearers of the family ‘honour,’ the default position of many households is that they must then be kept free of any reputation taints and that the best way to ensure this, is to keep them segregated and secluded.
But this approach simply cannot work in today’s hyper-connected world where even otherwise innocuous video games have built-in chat features. You cannot have an analog response in a digital world; you can take a girl out of school, you can restrict her movements and keep a close eye on who she talks to, but no matter what you do, you simply cannot avoid the fact that at some point, she will seek out peers who could turn into love interests fairly quickly due to the complete absence of interaction between the sexes.
Indeed, in the West, online gaming platforms are increasingly becoming a hunting ground for predators and pedophiles and there have been many cases right here in Pakistan of children being ‘befriended’ on chats or Facebook etc and then kidnapped, exploited or even trafficked.
Note also that Dua’s case is the second such case in recent days; Nimra Kazmi, another 14-year-old girl who was allegedly kidnapped from Karachi was found in Dera Ghazi Khan and she too claimed to have contracted a marriage of her own free will.
If we look only at the surface, then yes, it is very easy to write this all off as consensual, or else to blame social media and connectivity along with an overall degeneration of societal values. This may even be satisfying, confirming as it does, our inherent biases and the need to find simple solutions to complex and nuanced situations. But it won’t keep the Duas and Nimras of this world from running away.
With Dua’s revelation that the two started chatting on the popular mobile-based game PubG, there will undoubtedly be calls to ban this and other such platforms. Many parents will likely keep a closer eye on their children, and view even innocent interactions with suspicion. And though a little parental paranoia may be a good thing, we must understand that taking away a child’s communication devices is the easier thing to do. It’s infinitely harder and much more important to be able to communicate with your child.
– Zarrar Khuhro is a Pakistani journalist who has worked extensively in both the print and electronic media industry. He is currently hosting a talk show on Dawn News.
Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro
