Pakistani Rape Law

I've mentioned before that Pakistan's rape law, which in practice makes it more likely that the woman will be punished for alleged adultery than the man for sexual assault, is grounded in really shoddy legal reasoning and goes against, really, the past 1400 years of Islamic jurisprudence on the topic. Asifa Quraishi, the Islamic law professor at the University of Wisconsin's law school, lays the whole issue out in detail in an article you can download here that was published in multiple formats in the United States, Pakistan, and Malaysia. In a nutshell, sexual crimes are supposed to be hard to prove, and people who make false accusations or spread gossip are penalized. Violent crimes of personal injury, of course, are more easily punished. The geniuses who wrote the relevant laws in Pakistan decided that rape was primarily a sex crime.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)