After many weeks of feeling somewhat satisfied that Pakistan was finally on the right path in terms of giving legal protection to women – with the signing of the Women’s Protection Bill and the news that women were no longer required to appear in court to obtain the ever-elusive khula divorce – I opened the newspaper the other day to read the horrifying headline that a sixteen year old girl in Ubaro, Sindh, had been gang-raped by eleven men and paraded naked through the streets of her village.

Her crime? She was related to a man who eloped with a woman from a family different from his own. To avenge their “honor”, the men of the woman’s family decided to have the man’s sixteen year old cousin gang-raped. The sentence was carried out on a late January day, and the victim of this crime has been in her house ever since, lying on a small bed and moaning in pain, unable to escape the fact that her life has been destroyed, and wishing she were dead.

Since that day we’ve been treated to a recycling of all the old statements that we have been hearing since the same thing happened to Mukhtaran Mai in 2004. Government officials are “shocked” and “horrified”; they vow to “bring the culprits to justice” and “ensure the protection of women in Pakistan”.  Six out of the eleven men have been remanded in custody, and the police have been given fourteen days to submit a report to the government about their investigation into the crime.