THE murder last week of Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch at the hands of her own brother was a grim reminder that many women today are still at the mercy of backward and ignorant men who believe that a woman’s place is in the home.
Baloch, only 25, was strangled Friday at her family home in Multan in the Pakistani province of Punjab, reports say.
“I am proud of what I did,” her brother said after he was arrested. “I drugged her first, then I killed her. She was bringing dishonor to our family.”
Dishonor, in this case, came in the form of photos of herself that Baloch posted on Facebook, images that by most modern standards can only be described as tame. By the mores of a conservative Muslim society, however, they were regarded as nothing short of scandalous.
Baloch, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, cultivated an outrageous public persona, recently promising to perform a public striptease if the Pakistani cricket team won a major tournament, the Associated Press reported.
She built up a social media fan base of 40,000 Twitter followers and more than 700,000 followers on her Facebook page. In videos that quickly went viral, she gyrated to a popular rap song, and in her postings, spoke of female empowerment in a country where hundreds of women are murdered by family members every year in so-called honor killings.
Most recently, Baloch became embroiled in public scandal when she posted selfies with a prominent cleric in a Karachi hotel room during the holy Islamic month of Ramadan. In one picture, she wore the cleric’s trademark fur-lined hat.
The cleric said he had met her to discuss the teaching of Islam, but the government suspended him. In the aftermath, Baloch said she received death threats, but the Interior Ministry refused her requests for protection.
For Baloch’s brother, this was the last straw.
“I planned this after her scandal with the mufti and was waiting for the right time,” he said, adding that he expected to be remembered for bringing honor to his family and by earning his place in heaven.
“Girls are born to stay home and follow traditions. My sister never did that,” he said. “I want to inspire women.”
An independent human rights commission in Pakistan estimates that as many as 212 women were killed in the name of “honor” in the first five months of 2016.
Worse, the perpetrators of this violence are seldom brought to justice. If a man kills his wife, sister, daughter or even mother for “transgressive” behavior—falling in love or laughing loudly in public—that he feels bring shame on him or his family, another member of his family can “forgive” the culprit as the law allows, and the killer goes scot-free.
The backward mentality that allows such barbarism against women to exist may seem far removed from our daily reality, but underneath the thin veneer of civility and modernity, it lurks.
On a popular noontime show earlier this month, Senator Vicente Sotto III suggested that a woman that a male friend had taken advantage of was to blame because she drank with him. Shaming the woman on national TV, he also called her out for wearing “short shorts.”
Blaming the victim is never acceptable, whether you are a backward, narrow-minded brute in the Punjab—or a nationally elected senator in Metro Manila who ought to know better.
