UN WOMEN Pakistan, 16 Days of Activism 2011: MILLION NAMES - MILLION VOICES

For many years, the women’s movement and concerned organizations devoted energies to ‘breaking the silence’ on violence against women. This has enabled a shift away from universal acceptance of gender-based violence as a private matter and as a normalized aspect of relations between the sexes, to its positioning as a matter of public policy. Violence against women is a human rights and health emergency in Pakistan. Most women in Pakistan live in a world structured around strict family and traditional customs that essentially force them to live in submission and overall fear of trespassing family expectation of them as the custodians and carriers of the collective ‘izzat,’ – ‘dignity and honour.’ While Islamic law dictates traditional family values in Pakistan and is enmeshed in the legal system – gender discrimination and gender based violence in its myriad forms – remains a red alert area anchored both implicitly and explicitly in values, societal practices, attitudes and the parallel legal system.