A Woman Like Her

by Sanam Maher

  When the university re-opened in January, some of the girls were reluctant to return. They missed a few classes, but then slowly trickled back. Naila’s room is still sealed. She lived here with four other girls and not a single one has returned to the campus or answered calls from the university officials. Their belongings are still in the room and their education incomplete.

  “In the beginning, the girls felt scared to be in Marvi Hostel,” says the senior provost, Aneela Soomro. “They would say they could hear voices coming from Naila’s room and the sound of weeping or footsteps late at night. Some of the more mischievous girls started knocking on doors after midnight or making sounds just to scare people. But now I have girls coming to me and asking to live in Naila’s room. It’s an empty room and we don’t have enough space as it is.”

  As for what happened in that room on the night she died, the rumours and stories continue to be told, and in July Khaskheli was released from police custody on bail. The case continues, but not many at the university are hopeful that the outcome will help them understand what happened or how to keep female students safe online. “To take your life is a very big step,” a deputy provost says. “Why did she do it? Why was she so scared? Only Naila knows what happened. No one else can tell you.”

  * * *

  —

  When I meet Nighat in Lahore in January 2017 the helpline has been active for close to a month. “I decided to start it up in the name of Allah,” Nighat explains. “I figured I would find the funding.” A few days after Qandeel’s murder, Nighat wrote a tribute and published it online. And then she received a message: a global fund to support activists at critical junctures wanted to give her $5,000. A few weeks later another group got in touch. They offered her $20,000. And in November she won the 2016 Human Rights Tulip award for her work as a digital rights activist. The prize money: more than $100,000. “And just like that, I had the money for the helpline,” Nighat says with a smile.

  The helpline receives ninety-five calls in its first month. By the next month, the number has surged to 159 as word spreads. From Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., two women in their early twenties, Shmyla and Hira, answer the phones at the DRF office with a reassuring, “Assalam-o-alaikum, this is the cyber harassment helpline, how can I help you?”

  The team received extensive training from a not-for-profit organization before the helpline became operational, and it has been a steep learning curve for Nighat. “I had this moment where I realised I’ve been doing things completely wrong,” she says. “When I told the trainer about some of the ways in which I had to tackle complaints in the past, she was horrified.” She made Nighat promise not to get “inventive” with solutions. It has not been easy to do so. “Initially, we had prepared a script with a psychiatrist and rehearsed it,” explains Shmyla. “We were determined to stick to it. It went out the window pretty quickly.”

  The team does not ask for names or any identifying information, but callers usually quickly blurt everything out: real names, identity card numbers, the name of the school or college they study at and so on. They often insist, “I’m an educated person. I come from a good family.” They are scared they won’t be taken seriously. “They give us the information because they want to establish that they’re real,” Shmyla believes. “They want to tell us: I’m a real person. I’m not making this up.”

  Many female callers are desperate to prove that they did not invite the harassment and want to send DRF screenshots or messages. Other callers are embarrassed and wanted to talk in hypotheticals. “What if my friend sent pictures to her boyfriend?” one might ask. Some people are suspicious. They do not understand what DRF does and if they are affiliated to the government or police. All the callers have one thing in common: they need the problem to go away immediately.

  DRF’s job is to tell the callers about their rights when it comes to harassment and cybercrimes. They help them navigate the NR3C’s system and explain the procedure—including how long it will likely take the FIA to deal with their complaint—and offer emotional support throughout the process of dealing with NR3C officials. “We have to encourage the callers to use mechanisms that are already in place,” Nighat explains. “Only when those mechanisms are exhausted and the problem has not been solved do we try to fix it.” She hopes that as more and more complainants reach out to the NR3C, DRF will be able to receive feedback about problems with the government’s system, and then lobby for change. If callers do not want to deal with the NR3C or—particularly in the case of the LGBT or religious communities—are too scared to, Shmyla and Hira help them figure out a way to talk to friends or family members about the problem. In many cases, DRF speak to parents or siblings during a call as well.

  There is one firm rule: no promises are made to callers and they are never told, “I’ll fix this for you.” In her first three weeks working at the helpline this took a toll on Shmyla. “My shoulders were always tense and I felt helpless all the time,” she says. “I was snapping at everyone at home and my friends had started to wonder what was going on with me. I wasn’t behaving like myself.” When she spoke to Nighat about this, Shmyla realised what the problem was. “I knew the callers wanted to hear, ‘Don’t worry,’ and I just couldn’t say this.”

  One particular phone call is difficult to forget. “I picked up the phone and there was this girl sobbing,” Shmyla recalls. “She was hiding in her bathroom and calling me. She was younger than me. She told me, ‘I’m calling you as a last resort.’ She had been in a relationship with someone and he had photographs of her. He would tell her to send him more pictures, and if she would refuse, he would threaten to share the ones he had online. The demands would change. He would say, ‘I want you to come on Skype tonight. If you don’t, I’ll show the pictures to everyone.’ He knew where she lived and she was terrified that if she didn’t give him whatever he wanted, he would share the photos with her family.”

  Shmyla told the caller she had enough evidence for a case. She knew where the boy lived and his real name. The girl needed to go to the NR3C. Shmyla tried to convince her to confide in her sister, and have her accompany her to the NR3C office. “I never found out what happened,” Shmyla says. The girl never called back. “At the end of the day, I have to treat this as another job,” Shmyla explains. “It’s very hard to do that, but I’m beginning to realise that I have to.”

  She brings empathy into her interactions with callers as much as she can. She won’t promise them a solution, but she tries to reassure them by talking about other similar cases. She wants them to know they aren’t alone. She tells them what they are feeling is normal and they shouldn’t berate themselves. She breaks down the NR3C’s procedures and possible responses. It makes her feel useful when she can help build an evidence file for the NR3C, tell callers what steps to take and how long they can expect the FIA to take with their case.

  One complainant who has stayed in touch with the DRF team has been dealing with the FIA for a year and travelling every month to the NR3C office in Lahore to pursue their complaint. As only a small fraction of callers are able to undertake that kind of journey, DRF is now considering creating a network of volunteers or lawyers across the country who can accompany women or minors to cities with an office. In May 2017 a news report claimed that the NR3C office in Lahore, where DRF is based, had yet to clear a backlog of 6,000 cases registered in six months.16 The office had only seven personnel, and some of them were not trained to handle complaints, with simple forensic analysis that could be completed in ten to fifteen minutes taking months, the report added.

  “I had one case where the NR3C officials kept hinting that the complainant should drop the case,” Shmyla says. “They would say things like, ‘Evidence can be lost, you know.’ ” She encouraged the caller to insist on a formal complaint and then provide DRF with the details of the FIR so that they could see if the officials had worked up a strong enough case for prosecution.

 
The most commonly received complaints at the helpline are the creation of fake profiles, blackmail and the non-consensual sharing or manipulating of data such as phone numbers, photographs or personal information. In the overwhelming number of these cases, the complainant cannot afford to wait for weeks for the NR3C’s response.

  One man called the helpline on his sisters’ behalf, in order to ask for help in taking down Photoshopped pictures and fake Facebook profiles that shared the girls’ phone numbers and promised callers “anything you like.” The girls’ family, from a small town in Punjab, was being ostracized as the news spread. “I understand that this is not their fault,” the man said. “But how many people am I supposed to explain that to?” The girls were unmarried. Who would want to marry them after this?

  “We can tell those kinds of callers that we’ll provide them with emotional support and psychological help, but they don’t always want that,” Hira says. “When something is spreading like wildfire online, they don’t want to know how to cope with it—they just want the problem to go away. When I can’t help them with that, I begin to wonder, Are we even doing anything substantial? Will we ever be able to?” In such cases, or when a caller’s life is at risk or they cannot easily travel to another city with an NR3C office, DRF will tap into personal contacts and connections within the government, law enforcement agencies or NGOs and companies such as Facebook and attempt to have the material removed immediately.

  Hira says such cases have made her realise that she is not completely happy that the helpline exists. “I’m more frustrated that there is even a need for something like this,” she explains. At such moments, the simpler cases—someone needs help to deactivate their social media page or change their password after their phone has been stolen, or they cannot read English and need help navigating Facebook’s privacy settings—are a relief; a quick shot of motivation to keep going.

  Nighat still gets messages in her own inbox from women who are desperate for help, but these have slowly decreased to two or three a day. Now she no longer feels panicked if she is not constantly checking her phone. The DRF team has run extensive social media campaigns about the helpline, which has received local media coverage, and its number has been shared at every opportunity. Nighat has had time to pause and reflect on what else needs her attention. She even took her first vacation with her son recently, and when we Skyped, she looked happy and well rested. It was a brief respite from a job where her personal and public lives cannot help but seep in to one another—after all, she even lives at the DRF office, sharing two rooms on the first floor with her sister and son.

  “The work is personal for me,” she explains. “With every achievement, I feel like everything that happened to me, all the bad stuff, all the struggles, are slowly erased from my memory. I tell other women about what happened to me. I’m not from a privileged background. My struggle is that of any ordinary woman here. Women like me fight battles on two fronts: one for others and one for ourselves. There were many times when I wanted to give up, when I wanted to leave this work and just do something else. But then when I get messages or hear from women who need my help, they bring me back to the work.”

  Today, when Nighat reflects on her time at university and the days when she did not have permission to use a computer, she thinks of the room on the ground floor of her home where the walls are painted a cool deep green, and of the two women who wait for their phones to ring so they can help create a safer space online for anyone who wishes to be there. “I’m bringing up an army of women,” she says. “They may not have any background in this work and they may not know anything about digital rights. But I’m here to train them.”

  In January 2017, after they found out about Naila, Nighat and Shmyla wrote a searing open letter to the minister for information technology, Anusha Rahman. They reminded her of her promise to protect Pakistani women online through the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act of 2016. “A law which was enacted in the name of ‘protecting daughters of Pakistan’ couldn’t save the precious life of one daughter, namely Naila,” they wrote. “As you must have realised by now, Naila was driven to end her life when she was constantly threatened and intimidated. There is no support system out there for women to seek help; no emotional guidance on how to deal with gender-based threats and cyber harassment.” They criticized the NR3C system and pointed out that Naila would not have had access to an NR3C office in Jamshoro. “By assigning the task of enforcing a law relating to cyber harassment, stalking and bullying to a highly centralized federal agency with regional offices confined to Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, Quetta, and Peshawar, the Ministry is failing to reach women like Naila Rind.” The minister did not acknowledge the letter or the criticism.

  There are days when Nighat feels overwhelmed by the limits of the helpline. When she hears about cases like Naila’s or thinks about the constant stream of abuse and threats that Qandeel Baloch faced online every day, she feels she has taken on more than she can handle. But then Nighat reminds herself of her father and the building in Karachi that he helped to create all those years ago when he first moved to the city. For four decades, that building, where Mehar Allah worked tirelessly every day in order to earn enough to bring his family from their village to the city, was the tallest in Pakistan. Nighat knows that it takes time to build great, enduring things

  “I’M GOING TO DO SOMETHING THAT GETS EVERYONE WORRIED”

  She likes to joke that she often stays up until dawn because…well, do you know what happens when someone thinks of you? You get the hiccups or you cannot sleep. And do you know how many people are thinking of her late at night? By now she has more than 43,000 people following her on Twitter and 800,000 on Facebook. She has started using Instagram. It’s no wonder she’s tossing and turning and playing with her phone while everyone else she knows is sleeping soundly. She whiles away the time reading comments on her social media pages.

  “You’re a she-male and we know it.”

  What the fuck? That’s funny.

  “Fingering karti ho tum? [Do you finger yourself?]”

  What is fingering?

  “I offer you five lakh [500,000] rupees for one night fucking.”

  Oooof, that’s bad.

  “I wanna masturbate, show your boobs.”

  Gandi baat. Don’t talk like that.

  “Doggy style please.”

  Everyone want to fuck me.

  “Shame on you.”

  Why? What have I done? What should I feel shame for?

  “You actually deserve to b born some where in a house of slut who can fuck even only for a ride.”

  Same to you.

  “Don’t comment on this bitch because she is a lame ass retarted whore she can even lick the poop of a donkey. If I find this woman alone, I would kill her right on spot and would hide her haram body.”

  You watched my video. Did I tell you to watch it? Go listen to a qawwali [devotional music]. If you’re so pious, why are you watching my videos? Can’t sleep without watching some porn and you’re here lecturing me?

  They always say the same stuff. The curses have lost their bite. Come on, she encourages them in her videos, say something different to me. They respond by sending her pictures of erect penises.

  Interviewers are baffled by her and can’t understand why she still makes videos and puts up pictures. “We can’t even show our viewers some of the comments you get on your videos,” says one talk-show host. “You’re a girl and you get these remarks and comments—don’t you care? You still continue to do what you’re doing?” What kind of woman would not care?

  Here’s what she has learned: it’s just words. And when she doesn’t read the comments, those words don’t exist. She doesn’t want to care about what people think of her.

  If I took these people seriously, I wouldn’t be alive right now.

  Their words are like the barks of empty-bellied mon
grels on the street that bare their teeth and drool at you as you drive past in your car. They can’t touch you. Dogs bark, but who responds?

  Not all of the comments are hateful. Some of her fans send her private messages on Facebook.

  “I think everyone has the right to live and no one has the right to criticize anyone and besides all that you are doing great.”

  “I saw your video. Plz don’t cry like this because you have true followers who won’t like to see that…be happy, people love to talk and bark, so you ignore and you do what you think is right. U r so gorgeous pretty girl in the world ok so plz be happy.”

  A girl named Ayesha writes to her from India. “You are very beautiful. Don’t be sad. Find happiness in yourself. Don’t listen to the useless things others say. All the best for your bright future.”

  Love me or hate me, both are in my favour. If you love me, I will always be in your heart. If you hate me, I’ll always be in your mind.

  It has been a month since she uploaded the trailer for the striptease, but even now that’s all interviewers want to talk about. And so, in April, when she is invited to be on a talk show called Ajeeb Sa (Kind of Strange), which has a humorous angle, the host asks funny questions and the overall tone is not serious, she says yes. It might be fun.

  The host, Raja Matloob, likes innuendo and makes sly jokes about his guests. Every time he cracks a joke, there’s a burst of canned laughter and a giggling chimpanzee pops up on the screen. The show is shot in Lahore, but the producers say it isn’t a problem that Qandeel is in Karachi. She’s not the only guest on the programme—she will be sharing airtime with Mufti Abdul Qavi, a cleric from Multan, and the producers will just split the screen in two. Mufti Qavi has been a regular guest on talk shows, particularly Ajeeb Sa, since his spat during a live interview with the actress and model Veena Malik made headlines in January 2011.