KARACHI, March 1: Speakers at a function on Friday said that women had to wage a long struggle to bring about a change in social attitudes to get their due rights and equal social status in society.

Speaking at the function organized in connection with the Second Hamza Wahid Memorial Lecture by the Irtiqa Institute of Social Science and the Amnesty International at the PMA House, they said that the status of women had declined over the years due to the oppressive laws formulated by successive regimes in the past.

They said that women had been discriminated against from the very beginning, and sometimes when families learnt that the child about to be born was a girl — now possible because of advancement in medical technology — they opted for an abortion.

Then said when a girl was born, she was always discriminated against and a boy child in the family was always given preference over the girl child in every matter and it continued throughout their lives as they were considered inferior. When viewing the situation in a broader spectrum similar attitude was later reflected by society.

They said that women in the country had faced greatest victimization during the dictatorial regime of General Zia when in certain Punjab towns and cities women of opponent families had been forced to march naked in markets by the influential groups.

Tracing the history of women’s struggle for their rights they said that women had staged organized demonstration in the early 1980s against the suppressive laws and had been subsequently baton-charged by the police and thrown into prison by the government.

They said that a large number of women had been victimized due to the discriminatory laws — such as Hudood Ordinance, Law of Evidence, etc — introduced by the military government which had misused the name of religion to victimize women.

They said that a large number of women were killed in the name of honour killing. They said that first of all each such incident was not reported to the police, and towards those few which were reported, the attitude of the police was sympathetic towards the murderers.

They said that the police did not usually carry out the investigations carefully. They said that in many places women were not allowed to cast their votes — leave alone being allowed to contest the polls — in the recently held local bodies elections, and the sad part was all the major political parties including the Pakistan Pepole’s Party, Pakistan Muslim League, Awami National Party, etc had not only not opposed it but even supported it.

They said that now as more and more women were coming out of their homes to study and enter the job markets the number of incidents of harassment at educational institutions, work places, in transport, public places, etc was increasing with the passage of time.

They said that though a report on the status of women and recommendations had been prepared by the commission headed by Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid many years back, successive governments had not taken the trouble to implement these recommendations which could be a first step towards bringing about improvement in the status of the women in society.

Former Karachi University vice-chancellor Dr Manzoor Ahmad, Dr Mohammad Ali Siddiqui, Dr Jaffer Ahmad, Zahida Hina, Wahid Basheer, and others also spoke at the function.