A boy not yet in his teens is kidnapped and viciously raped by three village goons of the Mastoi tribe of Jatoi, a village near Muzzaffargarh in Southern Punjab. Fearing the boy may tattle, the rapists take him to their cousin, Abdul Khaliq, to find a way to keep him quiet. Khaliq is the ideal accomplice, as he already has an eye on a 2-acre plot of agricultural land belonging to his neighbor, the child's father Ghulam Farid Gujjar. The ruthless Khaliq locked the pathetic boy in a small room along, for good measure, with his own 25-year old sister Naseem!!

Meanwhile the three rapist gathered their clansmen of the Mastoi tribe telling them that the 12year old boy from the inferior Gujjar tribe was caught having sex with Khaliq's 25 year old sister!. Ten score or more of their kin promptly gathered to wreck vengeance. They formed a panchayat, or a village court, chaired by the local Mastoi tribal head, Faiz Baksh. Their verdict --- four Mastoies would publicly rape the boy's sister, Mukhtar Bibi. Justice would be done. The honor of the powerful Mastois would be redeemed. The lowly Gujjars would be brought down to their station. All would be well.

Mukhtar Bibi a 30-year old divorce, was duly summoned. In gleeful sight of hundreds of gathered villagers, Mukhtar Bibi was dragged into a room and repeatedly raped by the four Mastois. As though their lust was not satiated, the rapists then paraded the miserable girl naked through the village, her body and her honor all in tatters. The broken hearted father, a witness to his gentle daughter's public humiliation, rushed to the police station to pay the bribe and at least save his son. He dared not file a complaint about his daughter's rape, lest she be dragged into the net of the corrupt policemen and made a victim of their lust.

For a week the family suffered its shame and ignomy in the very same silence that the poor, the weak and the miserable are condemned to, while their powerful tormentors and colluding policemen went gleefully about their obnoxious business, secure in the feeling that their terrible deed would fade away unchallenged.

But not for long. A local newspaper in a nearby town broke the story. Wire services picked it up. A horrified nation woke to seething editorials and news items full of angst. The revulsion was universal. An indignant Governor of the Punjab province ordered swift action. Police were galvanized to help the victims. President Musharraf sent his own emissary to grieve with the devastated family of the victims. His cheque of Rs. 500,000, perhaps well meaning, was spurned by the destitute humiliated and yet honorable Mukhtar Bibi, who graciously and most honorably refused the money, suggesting that it be used instead to build a school in her village, where none existed.

But more was yet to come. Such incidents of rape, of honor killings, of violence towards women, of the torment of children, have occurred with disgraceful regularity for decades. In the District of Muzzaffargarh 22 other rape cases were reported in the month of June 2002 alone. 54 Rapists were named. Many more cases in the district went unreported. And there are over a hundred districts like Muzzaffargarh in Pakistan. There have often been histrionics galore and crocodile tears shed out of sympathy, but seldom has any firm and concrete action been taken. This time it is very different. Heads have rolled. Colluding and corrupt policemen, sodomists and rapists and members of the totally police for their behavior and demanded a weekly report on the progress of the case, declaring the incident the worst human rights abuse of the 21^st Century.

Why this sudden interest? It is not merely incidental. Nor co-incidental. It is perhaps a logical outcome of thousands of hours of dedicated work put in by hundreds of people in  the last two years. Since the Convention on Human Rights and Human Dignity of April 2000,a great deal has happened. Basic changes have been implemented in the concept of human rights in the nation's school system. The curriculum of classes 1 to 10 has been modified to include, for the first time ever, the study of human rights subjects. Hundreds of master trainers have attended diploma courses. Thousands of teachers have been sensitized in human rights at workshops conducted at dozens of district headquarters. A thousand programs have been broadcast on radio. Scores of TV programs like PTV's "Sahr Honay ko Hai" and Indus Vision's "Ghairat" have emulated heartrending tales of women's rights and honour killings. Bureaucrats are learning human rights in NIPA and Police and Judicial and Civil Services Academies. Hundreds of media persons, electronic and print, have attended workshops in all the provincial capitals, There have been courses for religious scholars, male and female. In another bold and highly unusual initiative, the police Inspectors General of all the provinces last year conducted 3 and 4 days workshops on human rights issues for hundreds of their officers, something that was unheard of in Pakistan ever before.

All these measures, painstakingly taken over the last two years, have started to produce results. The multitude of people who have put in their direct and significant support through administrative or personal contributions, have included Pakistanis and foreigners, government employees and private citizens, lawyers, educationists, judges religious scholars, etc. The endless list has included humanitarian ministers Attiya Inayatullah, Zubaida Jalal, and Mir Hussain Bakhsh Bungalzai; bureaucrats Tariq Farook, Anwar Mehmood, Tariq Saeed Haroon, Kh Ejaz Sarwar, Dr. Farid A Khawaja, Jalil Abbas and Dr. Haroona Jatoi; Ambassadors Yannick Gerard, Hans Joachim  Daer, Peter Tejler and Hans Lokollo; educationists Nasreen Iqbal, Dr. Aslam Khaki, Rukhsana Nazir, Anees Jilani, Mehboob Sada and Dr. Arno Keller; lawyers Dr. Babar Awan, Naheeda Mehboob

The work they have all put in has surely helped sensitize society. Awareness has grown. It will take several more years for tangible trends to emerge and for more concrete results to show. One thing however, is certain. Administrators, ministers, policemen, judges Lawyers, teachers media-men and others are taking note of atrocities against the vulnerables in society and are acting as they never have before. The days of the dominance of criminals over the meek and the poor are numbered. There are, of course, ever-present skeptics and the habitual obstructionists, both in and out of government, but they are fighting a losing battle. The juggernaut of human rights and human values is now unstoppable. The programs of awareness and education are on the increase and law enforcement agencies themselves are beginning to realize that their principal role surely is to protect the rights of citizens. While the unfortunate Mukhtar Bibi and her little brother pick up the shattered pieces of their lives, and their family recovers from its terrible trauma, a nation hangs its head in shame but is ever more resolute in facing the challenge of eradicating this evil from its midst.