RECENTLY, the Punjab government held a ground-breaking ceremony for a new initiative in supporting women who are victims of violence. The pilot Violence Against Women Centre in Multan aims to bring all services for women under one roof, including first aid, legal aid and advice, medical examinations and forensics, police reporting, and post trauma rehabilitation.

For women who have had to go from police office to hospital to lawyer’s office to psychologist, this will reduce at least some of the stress of their trauma.

The Multan centre will open in March 2016, and is expected to be followed by 34 similar centres. The focus is in south Punjab, because this is where rates of violence against women are highest. The centre is meant to be a vast improvement on shelters in Pakistan, which currently operate under unsatisfactory, unsafe conditions paired with mediaeval attitudes towards women who are victims of domestic violence. But can this new type of centre truly deliver on what it promises?

Safety, not dependence should be the goal of women shelters.

Over the years, there have been many women and men, organisations and centres, government figures and professionals committed to helping women break out of the circle of violence in Pakistan. No one of these is better known than Hina Jilani, the Supreme Court advocate and human rights activist who started her own women’s shelter, Dastak, 25 years ago. She recently gave a keynote speech at the third World Conference of Women’s Shelters in the Netherlands on this very subject, where 1,000 women from 100 different countries had gathered to connect and act to end violence against women.

Ms Jilani has first-hand experience not just in the terrible problem of violence against women in Pakistan, but in how those who seek to protect battered women are themselves threatened. A religiously motivated political party once staged a ‘mock funeral’ for her as a way of intimidating her, but she remained steadfast. Today, no political party or government can ignore the issue of women’s rights, thanks to her activism with the Women’s Action Forum from the 1980s onwards.

Running Dastak as woman not as a social worker but as a lawyer, Ms Jilani’s unique understanding of women’s legal status is combined with a passion for women’s rights and a compassion for the women that has remained undimmed over the 35 years of her career. The women she works with there, she says, have taught her much about dignity and resilience.

Ms Jilani is cognisant of the buzzwords — women’s empowerment, education, awareness-raising — that are used in all discussions and strategies for ending violence against women. But her approach to the problem, based on her experience representing the victims of the worst kinds of crimes against women, is different. Education alone cannot empower a woman: political engagement is vital in ensuring women gain both rights and protection under the state.

She set up Dastak to operate in a very different way from the way shelters are usually run in Pakistan. Most shelters violate the human rights of the women living there, locking them in and treating them as prisoners of a custodial system. By contrast, there is no custodial restraint at Dastak; women can sign out and leave the premises, under their own responsibility. “You can’t take away all her fundamental rights or freedom of movement.”

Instead of treating women’s development in general and violence against women as a problem to be shouldered only by women, Ms Jilani sees the problem as the responsibility of the entire community. Women who have been abused and need to flee their homes and seek shelter elsewhere are not usually welcomed in their new communities. Ms Jilani counters that by bringing the woman out into public and interacts visibly with her and her family, so that others in the community become less suspicious of her, and at least cease to treat her with hostility.

Dastak has helped approximately 7,500 women, and with only a handful of bad experiences, Ms Jilani is very pleased with its impact. But what happens when the woman has to leave the shelter and resettle back in the real world? Ms Jilani emphasises that she does not tell women what to do or where to go; she only presents their options to them. “Our business is to protect women, not create dependency.”

The Pakistani women who are surviving and standing up to domestic violence deserve exactly this kind of respect and support. Whatever the logistics or facilities of the new Violence Against Women Centres, they must apply Hina Jilani’s philosophy of protection with dignity rather than continuing the normal tradition of treating the victims of violence as moral and social criminals. Only then can the project be truly considered a success, rather than just another cosmetic solution to the pandemic disease of violence against women in our country.

The writer is the author of A Season for Martyrs.

Twitter:@binashah

Published in Dawn, November 8th, 2015

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