‘Women wearing few clothes will have an impact on men’: Imran Khan’s remarks draw wide criticism

An outcry erupted on Monday after Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan suggested that women’s clothing influences sexual violence.

“If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the men, unless they’re robots,” Khan said in an interview to American news website Axios. Snippets of the interview, which is expected to be out later this week, were released on social media on Monday.

The prime minister was also asked about comments he made in April linking the rise in sexual violence to “increasing obscenity” in society, according to Dawn. Activists had denounced his comments at that time for perpetuating a culture of victim blaming.

“The concept of purdah is to avoid temptation in society,” Khan told Axios. “We don’t have discos here [in Pakistan], we don’t have nightclubs, so it is a completely different society, way of life here, so if you raise temptation in society to the point and all these young guys have nowhere to go, it has consequences in the society.”

Pakistan Muslim League spokesperson Marriyum Aurangzeb castigated Khan for his remarks, calling him “sick, misogynistic and degenerate”.

“It is not women’s choices that lead to sexual assault rather the choices of men who choose to engage in this despicable and vile crime,” she tweeted. “Maybe the misogynist, degenerate can defend pedophiles and murderers, as he advocates for rapist, after all, men cannot be expected to control temptation.”

Pakistan Peoples Party senator Sherry Rehman said the prime minister’s remarks were highly irresponsible. “Does IK [Imran Khan] not know that by saying women should dress a certain way, he is giving oppressors and criminals against women a new narrative to justify their behaviour,” she asked. “There is NO justification for a prime minister to talk this way.”

Columnist Mosharraf Zaidi said the comments show an intent to absolve rapists of the responsibility for their actions. “It isn’t complicated and you don’t need to be a feminist or a gender studies PhD to understand it,” he wrote on Twitter. “What does the argument that rape is a product of the rapists’ environment show?”

In April, hundreds of people had signed a statement demanding an apology from Khan for his views. The signatories added that the prime minister’s comments blaming a rise in rape cases on how women dressed were “factually incorrect, insensitive and dangerous”.

Protests jolted Pakistan last year after a woman was gangraped in front of her two children on September 11 by the side of a motorway in Lahore. The woman was driving a car with her children, when it broke down on the motorway as it ran out of fuel. She called the police and waited. However, at least two men allegedly broke the windows of her car, dragged her and her two children out of the vehicle and raped her repeatedly.

Khan’s government has faced pressure to speed up justice for rape survivors. Official statistics show that at least 11 rape incidents are reported in the country everyday, with over 22,000 cases reported to the police in the last six years.