IT may be the 21st cen-tury but in Pakistan, that is merely a technicality. The archaic and often criminal notions of justice and honour, particularly the treatment meted out to women, speak of a society that remains mired in a medieval mindset. This is evident in the grotesque incident which took place this week in Neelor Bala village in Haripur district. According to the statement recorded in court on Tuesday by the middle-aged victim, she was pulled out of her house by at least four men, stripped naked and dragged through the streets. Reportedly, the entire village witnessed the ugly spectacle but no one dared intervene because the assailants were armed. Her crime? One of the attackers suspected that his wife had been assaulted by the victim's son.

The redemption of one person's honour through a criminal assault on a woman is far from unheard of in Pakistan, even though rarely reported from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Last July, for example, two women were publicly stripped and thrashed by over a dozen men in the Punjab town of Shehr Sultan, again because of suspicions about a relationship one of their relatives was having. Perhaps the first such case to have been reported — it is reasonable to assume that many go unreported — took place in 1984 in Nawabpur: the public stripping and beating of two women and a young girl prompted the government to insert Section 354-A into the Pakistan Penal Code, raising the maximum sentence for this crime to the imposition of death pen-alty or life imprisonment. Nevertheless, we continue to see women paying in the most repugnant of ways for their relatives' perceived transgressions. Sadly, regardless of the laws in place for protecting women and criminalising violations on their persons, the underlying issue remains a barbaric mindset where women are viewed as currency for the settling of scores. In the Neelor Bala case, the police have registered an FIR and some of the accused have been arrested. Will there be justice though? The case of Mukhtaran Mai, who recently complained of a miscarriage of justice when the Supreme Court upheld the acquittal of five accused, springs to mind.