http://www.dawn.com/news/1099622/sunday-magazine-special-sexual-harrasment
* Criminal advances
* Indecent proposals
* One step forward
Ask any Pakistani woman, and she’ll tell you it doesn’t take much to cross the line between banter and lewdness: an inappropriate touch, an unwanted remark, or even indecent flirtation. With women often advised to stay mum in the face of abuse, sexual harassment is reaching epidemic proportions in Pakistan.
Noman Ansari
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Crouched on the edge of her bed, she scrolled the touch screen of her mobile phone as her hands trembled. She read and re-read the text messages arriving seemingly every second from an unknown number. She knew who this was and wished she didn’t. She broke out into a cold sweat; yes she was scared. Abusive words, threats of physical abuse, violence in public, damage to her car — he was telling her how dirty, advanced, low, helpless and alone she was and how he would punish her for ignoring his attention. This was sexual harassment that she had heard happens to others and now it was happening to her.
It started with what seemed like harmless office pranks. Six months into a new job in Karachi; Saima started noticing strange happenings at her place of work — sabotaged equipment and missing property. She grew concerned when one day, she stepped out of her office to discover some missing documents appear suddenly outside her office door, neatly cut up and displayed, like some horrific scene out of an Alfred Hitchcock flick.
As the ‘pranks’ grew more worrisome, Saima and her co-worker, Kiran, began reporting the incidents to the management, who were slow to react, “They weren’t quite sure how best to handle the situation. Often, they didn’t seem to know what the next step should be.”
Unfortunately for the women, the incidents only escalated. Like characters caught in a bad film, they regularly began receiving lewd text messages, accurately describing what they were wearing to work. “Disgusting...
