ISLAMABAD: “This is a country with serious issues of attitudes and governance (where) killing a woman is given no more weight than killing a dog. Violence is not only tolerated here, it is now encouraged.”

This was Feryal Gauher’s dramatic exposition of women’s position in Pakistani society, presented at ‘Gender Matters’, one of the penultimate sessions of the Islamabad Literature Festival.

The session was headlined by Gauher, academic Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Indian activist Ritu Menon and moderated by writer and critic Salman Asif.

Asif set the tone for the session by stating at the outset that gender matters were about giving a voice to the disenfranchised and making visible those who were invisible.

Reading from her first book, Gauher contended that the line between punishment and crime was blurred in Pakistan. “The dogma is that a woman who does not 'obey' can be punished,” she said.

Akhtar said that at the intersection of gender and inequality lay crimes against women, the most visible and grotesque manifestation of violence motivated by gender, class, religious and ethnic vulnerabilities.

“We need to recognize that there are men and women, movements of women and men, who are trying to mitigate the ignominy of these issues,” he said hopefully.

Menon lamented the fact that women are in exactly the same place now as they were at the time of Partition.

“The question is not whether there is violence against women but why it still continues,” she said. She argued that there was a need to change the terminology.

“The problems we are discussing are not gender issues but women’s issues, the violence is not against a socially constructed amorphous ‘gender’ but against women, and the movements are women’s movements not gender movements,” she said.