13-Year-Old Girl Rape In Pakistan As of to Take 'Revenge'

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The extended family members all lived within yards of each other, in a small village near a river bank in Pakistan's largest province, Punjab. It was in this village in Muzaffarabad, a suburb of the city of Multan, where the first of two rapes took place.

 A daughter of the family, around the age of 12 or 13, was cutting the grass in nearby fields on July 16 when a teenage boy covered her with a cloth and raped her, police said. The boy was a 16-year-old relative of hers.

 In the days that followed the girl's rape, the family's elders gathered together in shock and anguish, seeking to resolve what had happened. But mourning soon led to vengeance. The elders - who effectively served as the family's "panchayat," or village council - decided that justice should be served as revenge.

 They instructed the victim's brother, who is about 16, to rape the teenage sister of the attacker in return for his crime, Ahsan Younis, head of the Multan city police, told The Washington Post. 

 So the 16-year-old brother followed suit, assaulting the teenage girl in his family's home and effectively carrying out what Younis called a "revenge rape."

But as they investigated the cases, police learned there were dozens of additional family members involved, Younis said. Authorities ordered the arrests of 29 people - all members of the extended family. 

Of those, 25 have already been taking into custody, including the first of the accused assailants. Family members admitted to police that the second rape was ordered as retaliation for the first one. But they asserted that the decision was a consensual one between the two families.

The "revenge rape" has spurred outrage in Pakistan and prompted the country's chief justice early Thursday to order the inspector general of Punjab police to submit a report regarding the case, according to Dawn. 

 It has shed light on the continued prevalence of the panchayat system, an informal village governance system in which village leaders have been known to settle disputes over women with forced marriages, stonings and other punishments.

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