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ON Thursday Sept 22, three women were produced in a district court in Meerut in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India. The girls’ crime was attacking and stabbing to death a man named Shamim Ahmad. He had loaned their family Indian rupees 100,000, and since then had been showing up at their house, using the loan as a means of abusing them. A few days before the murder, the eldest sister had been sexually assaulted. In the days since, Ahmad had been pressurising the other sisters to ‘give in’ as well, according to the police. One night, the three sisters armed with three knives stabbed him 20 times and killed him.
Murder is always wrong but cases such as the one in UP involving women who have been abused and stand in danger of being further abused present circumstances where justice is not a simple matter of guilt and innocence. Were women like the three sisters acting in self-defence? If they were acting in self-defence, should they be treated differently from cold-hearted killers? These are complicated questions and answers to them cannot be developed without remembering the fact that by and large, it is men who kill and abuse women rather than the other way around.
The rare cases in which abused women do lash out at their male abusers occur all around the world. French President François Hollande intervened recently in the case of Jacqueline Sauvage. She had killed her abusive husband Norbert Marot after her son, who had also been abused by his father, hanged himself. According to the testimony of their three daughters, Marot beat and raped his wife and his daughters while also abusing his son. The family was so humiliated that they did not dare tell anyone what was happening to them. After her son’s death, Sauvage took a hunting rifle and shot her husband to death. She had been sentenced to 10 years in prison until the French president intervened. She may be set free following Hollande’s intervention.
Murder is always wrong but in cases involving women who have been abused, justice is not a simple matter.
Not all women are so lucky. In March, Wendy Maldonado was finally free after serving a 10-year sentence in a prison in Oregon in the United States. Maldonado had been convicted of killing her abusive husband who would choke her until she passed out and who had knocked out 17 of her teeth. While sentencing her, the judge (who only determines the sentence and not guilt or innocence) said that Maldonado and her children had endured some of the worst abuse that he had ever seen. In her defence, Maldonado pleaded that she had had no choice but to kill her abusive husband.
It is tricky and difficult to even draw attention to these rare cases when abused women lash out at their abusers. This is because focusing on them threatens to obscure the fact that the vast majority of killers (four out of five in the US) are men. Murder by men is in fact one of the leading causes of death for young women. In some countries, these men are apprehended and punished and serve sentences for their crime.
In Pakistan, this is not often the case. Male murderers, often owing to the collusion of other family members and apathetic law enforcement, are easily able to cover up their crimes. In the odd case where the crime cannot be covered up, there are provisions in Pakistani law that permit the families of the victims (which are also often the families of the murderers) to pardon the perpetrators and the whole issue of justice and punishment is done away with.
That reality, the one that permits male murderers to routinely get away with killing wives, daughters, sisters and even mothers, does not seem to bother anyone in Pakistan. The case of the UP sisters, and the premise that they should be pardoned or not punished like other murderers, is likely to rile many men. It’s a hypocritical reaction; many of the same men would insist that women are physically and mentally weak, should not be afforded the same opportunities as men, and must live under male guardianship rather than enjoy autonomy.
They would not, for instance, agree to the institution of a Battered Woman Syndrome defence in Pakistani law. Per such a defence, which is recognised in many parts of the United States, the particular circumstances under which an abused woman attacks and kills her abuser must be evaluated as a defence that mitigates the nature of the crime. Women who kill in particular circumstances of abuse are hence offered special consideration owing to what they have suffered and the genuine fear they feel at the hands of their abusers.
The three sisters in UP are not alone. Thousands of women and girls across Pakistan face similar circumstances, given away as repayments of debts, beaten and abused day and night at the whim of their cruel abusers. Laws exist to stop this, but as newspapers dismally document, they rarely come to the aid of the abused. Families keep quiet; policemen, in the few cases in which they are called, fail to come to the aid of the abused. Caught in these hopeless situations, so many women choose to end their lives because they cannot believe there is any hope against their abusers. Their deaths, like the abuse that caused them, are also usually ignored, appearing, if ever, in slim columns in the back pages of the newspaper.
Recognising these realities requires recognising the Battered Woman Syndrome defence, not as encouragement for self-help and murder, but rather the reality and cruelty of the fears perpetuated by abusers over their wives and daughters. Self-defence is recognised as a defence for men who kill; so too must the Battered Woman Syndrome defence be recognised in the case of women who act in the grip of fear, without the hope of choice.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn September 28th, 2016
