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Police arrest men for marching girl naked through village in Pakistan

22:10, Friday, 03 November, 2017
Police arrest men for marching girl naked through village in Pakistan

Police in Pakistan have arrested eight men on suspicion of marching a naked teenager through her village in revenge for her brother allegedly damaging their family "honour".

According to officers in Dera Ismail Khan, in the northwestern Khyber Paktunkhwa province, the men assaulted and humiliated the 16-year-old in retaliation for her brother having a romantic relationship with a girl from their family outside marriage three years earlier.

The incident is believed to have occurred during the morning of 27 October when the girl was fetching water. She was set upon by the men, stripped naked and dragged along the ground before being made to walk around the village for an hour, police said. The local village council is believed to have originally fined the boy's family R250,000 (£1,800) in relation to the original incident but the men then decided to punish his sister.

The case is one of a growing number to emerge in Pakistan where people use the female members of a family to inflict retribution on men.

These actions are often sanctioned, or even ordered, by local village councils, called panchayat or jirga, which bypass the official judicial system to impose tribal punishments on innocent girls and women for their male relatives’ actions.

It is thought that hundreds of women are murdered every year when these village councils sanction “honour killings”, The Guardian reported.

In July, an all-male village council near Multan in the neighbouring Punjab province sentenced a 17-year-old girl to be raped after her brother allegedly carried out a sexual assault against another woman.

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