The household was fast asleep when the six men broke in. They sought out Sobia Batool Shah, 22, and one of them attacked her with a hatchet, chopping at her limbs in an effort to sever her legs. “He was relentless and must have hit me at least 15 times,” she says.
“I screamed in pain and pleaded with him to stop, but he was like a man possessed,” she adds. “I even told him I will not seek a divorce.”
Shah was attacked by men from her own family – including her father, Syed Mustafa Shah, her uncle and cousins – who broke into the house, in Naushahro Feroze, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, as “punishment” for refusing to withdraw her application to divorce her husband.
Speaking to the Guardian by phone from the Peoples University of Medical and Health Sciences for Women, in the city of Nawabshah, where she is being treated, Shah says she is in “immense pain” and her legs are both in plaster.
“The doctors have put a rod in one leg,” she says.
“It’s all about power control,” says Dr Summaiya Syed Tariq, chief police surgeon in Sindh’s capital, Karachi.
Syed Tariq, who also heads the Sindh police medico-legal department, has seen hundreds of women physically and mentally abused, raped, burned and murdered over the last 26 years.
“We are nurturing abusers who are worse than animals,” she says.
On an average day, the department receives reports of about six cases of sexual violence and 10 to 15 cases of domestic violence across the medico-legal centres at three public hospitals in Karachi.
“In the case of sexual violence against minors, my assessment is that for every three cases that come to us, seven more go unreported. And I am not counting the dead bodies that we receive,” Syed Tariq adds.
Gender inequality is a global problem, but Pakistan’s indicators reflect especially alarming rates of disparities and violence faced by women. According to this year’s World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report, Pakistan is ranked second from bottom out of 146 countries, behind only Sudan. It ranked 164 out of 193 countries on the 2023-24 UN gender inequality index.
Abdullah Lakhair, deputy superintendent of police in Naushahro Feroze, says the victim’s father admitted the attack, telling police his daughter had brought “dishonour” to the family by filing for divorce.
She had asked the authorities for protection after her father threatened to kill her previously. “Earlier last month, the district judge had referred her to a women’s shelter, where she stayed for two weeks, but then decided to return to her mother. The incident happened soon after,” Lakhair says.
Shah says her father had left her mother and siblings and cut all ties with them. “Had it not been for my maternal grandfather and my uncle, we would not have had a roof over our head all these years. How dare he talk about his honour being sullied by my divorce,” she says.
Lakhair says Shah’s father is awaiting sentencing and could face up to 14 years in prison.
The incident has sparked angry reactions from the public and civil society organisations in Pakistan. Anis Haroon, a women’s rights activist and former chair of the National Commission on the Status of Women, travelled from Karachi to visit Shah in hospital. She is sceptical about the case sparking any meaningful change.
“Like so many harrowing incidents in the past, this will soon be forgotten,” she says. Pakistan has the laws but no “political will” to implement them, she adds.
“The legislators think their work ends after laws are passed in assemblies. They fall short of putting efforts towards their implementation,” Haroon says.
After the attack on Shah, her mother went to neighbours for help, thinking her unconscious daughter had lost so much blood she must have died.
“After giving her immediate medical help, we sent her to Nawabshah, an hour and a half from here,” says Lakhair. “She had to be given 10 bags of blood, which the police arranged. She is in safe hands, for now.”
Although her father is in prison awaiting sentencing, Shah has been provided with round-the-clock police protection in the hospital.
“My father has been apprehended but his brother has been granted bail. I am very scared,” she says.
