Twenty people have been arrested in rural Pakistan after a village council ordered the rape of a teenage girl whose brother had been accused of raping another local girl.
According to the BBC, a man approached the council in Multan, Punjab province last month saying that his 12-year-old daughter had been raped by her cousin.
Police in Pakistan said the council then ordered the sister of the accused be raped in return. “A jirga [village council] had ordered the rape of a 16-year-old girl as punishment, as her brother had raped a 12-year-old,” police official Allah Baksh told AFP.
The council, which is comprised of some 40 men, ordered the victim to be raped in front of the council members and her parents, according Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper.
Both of the girl’s mothers later filed reports with the local police station. Several of the men involved, including the suspected rapist of the 12-year-old girl were still at large.
In 2002, Mukhtar Mai — now a prominent women’s rights activist — was sentenced by a village council to be gang-raped after her 12-year-old brother was accused of an affair with an older woman.
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