On board flight number ED 410, Nazar Muhammad Chohan, a lawyer based in Lahore, senses something dubious around him on this Dubai-bound flight.

I’ve done my fair share of strange stories in the short time that I have been a journalist in Pakistan, but how to go about narrating the story of a foreign prostitute in this foreigner-unfriendly country? Do I just call one and say, ‘Hi, I’m doing a story on prostitution, can you please tell me your life story? Or should I call her as a client, pay her whatever she makes in a night and then just ask personal questions? Would she find that strange or just write it off as another client quirk? Would she even be willing to talk? And where will I get her number from in the first place?

Anjali was stuck. Stuck. Trapped. She couldn’t leave him. What would happen to the children? What would they do the next time he was in one of his moods? She had been a good child, always listening to her parents. She worked hard and did well in school, and could embroider, stick, knit, sew, paint, sketch, and cook better than any of her sisters. A pleasant smile was never far from her face. Her heart on her sleeve, she gave generously to those around her, and always had a kindly word for anyone who may need it. All she wanted was joy. She had never thirsted after money, manipulated her position for power.

Living in the bleak rural outskirts of Multan, Razia Mushtaq had a childhood full of hardship. She was from an underprivileged family. There was no silver spoon. Her father was a shoe mender. Such was the bitter reality she had to face, day after day. Their house was a mud-and-brick structure, covered by a flimsy tin roof, incurred at considerable expense.

by Blogger Creator

Our civilization is very maturing that human is able to offer unique solutions to problems he created. With trillions of dollars being spend on the ongoing War on terror a spectrum of problems came haunting throughout the world in the name of poverty, unemployment, economy meltdown & what not. These trillions of dollars are in the now puffy pockets of the western arms-dealers & manufacturers, but lets not transgress into this war topic…

Partner abuse leads to HIV infection, and black women are most at risk. A new study at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing has found that 46 percent of African-American adolescent girls report that their partner did not use a condom the last time they had sex -- often because of partner abuse. The girls described physical and sexual abuse and threats as preventing them from having their partner use condoms. The relationship between HIV and partner abuse is significant: In the U.S., at least 12 percent of HIV infections among women are a result of partner abuse.

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Polygamist Warren Jeffs (C) is flanked by Las Vegas Metro Police SWAT officers during an extradition hearing at the Clark County Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, in this August 31, 2006 file photograph. – Reuters Photo

He is a polygamist religious leader who married many women, including underage girls, and raped a minor. He banned parades, dances and magazines like the Sports Illustrated and Car and Driver and yet revelled in the company of multiple wives.

BY MARA HVISTENDAHL

How did more than 160 million women go missing from Asia? The simple answer is sex selection -- typically, an ultrasound scan followed by an abortion if the fetus turns out to be female -- but beyond that, the reasons for a gap half the size of the U.S. population are not widely understood. And when I started researching a book on the topic, I didn't understand them myself.

BY ELLEN KNICKMEYER

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—On the "ladies' level" at the Kingdom Centre shopping mall in the Saudi capital, winds of change for Saudi women are blowing among the racks of bras. Gender barriers are falling among the body-shapers and panties. In what Saudi activists argue is one of several potentially momentous moves this spring and summer to ease some of the toughest strictures in the world upon women, Saudi Arabia says that it is remaking employment regulations -- so that women clerks can wait upon female customers in lingerie stores.

Pir told her parents that the djinn had been exorcised and that the only way to get rid of the demon was to burn her and beat it out.

KHANEWAL: A pir beat a woman, while performing an exorcism on Friday morning.

Some 90 per cent of Afghan women face some form of domestic violence - many are forced into early marriage, kidnapped, or raped with no hope of justice

In December 2010, in a small house located in Sarbande Chakush village in the Juzjan province of Afghanistan, a 14-year-old girl named Aziza was abruptly awakened by loud banging on the front door in the middle of the night.

The Vatican visitation prompts reflection on a religious divide.

Religious life among women is undergoing a massive evolutionary change that can only be described as cataclysmic. The Vatican’s apostolic visitation of congregations of women religious in the United States and the recent investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious indicate that Rome is unhappy with so-called post-Vatican II nuns who have donned secular clothes and abandoned traditional community life. The current statistics show a trend. The number of religious sisters and cloistered nuns in the United States was almost 180,000 in 1965. In 2009 there are just over 59,000, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. A steady decline in the number of women religious, together with the fact that their median age is 75, is a sign that religious life in the United States is a dying institution. Yet new communities have sprouted up in which women religious don a traditional habit and follow a daily schedule of prayer and service. These communities are attracting youthful, vibrant vocations. On the surface, the future of religious life seems to be on their side.

Iqbal Hussain is a controversial painter based in Pakistan. Not controversial in the Western sense - he's no Dash Snow or Andres Serrano - Iqbal showcases a side of Pakistan that many Pakistani's would rather not acknowledge.
I'm no expert on Hussain's work, so I'll quote excerpts from a fine article on All Things Pakistan written by Pervaiz Munir Alvi.

Enter the oldest & meanest brothel system of India, where you can buy females as less as 50 cents. Child pornography, drug dealing is common & law enforcements are all but blind. Peek into the economic giant India & face the ugliest truths in the poverty stricken population of Mumbai brothels.

Naseema was born into and lives in one of India's most infamous brothels but is now working to free trafficked women.

India's handwritten magazines have long fascinated me. But while researching the subject for a blog, I came across one in particular that stood out. Jugnu is a 32-page monthly magazine that has been written and published by the sex workers of the Chaturbhuj-sthan brothel in Bihar, near the border with Nepal, for the past 10 years.

by Sana Saleem

That reporting a rape is an arduous ordeal is a truth that resounds globally. When braving for police investigations, enumerating the ordeal in court and damaging stereotypical media representations become a norm then the argument for a pellucid approach becomes preemptory.

In 2006, a much-heated debate on the Hudood Laws revealed the anatomy of rape, conflicting legalities involving misinterpretations of Shariah Laws and the deeply engrained distorted public perceptions. For those who followed the debate, there should be no qualms in admitting that it made the inherent flaws in interpretations of the law and the systematic distortion of a society sensitive to violence and abuse evident.

The news of an elderly woman being paraded naked in Haripur, a remote village in Punjab, is really heart throbbing. Her crime? Her son is accused of adultery with a fellow village woman. The village jury declares her son guilty and the victim (her mother) is paraded around the streets naked, as the punishment. Justice dispensed! I wonder if the chief arbiter had pronounced the same verdict had he been accused of adultery/rape. But that is another story. In our Orwellian world, some people are just more equal than others.

So, what then, disturbs me is the fact that why, each time, a mother has to pay for the crimes of her son? Why, always, is a sister punished for a wrong done by her brother? Is this our way of restoring honour? Bartering and exchanging girls like cattle, raping them in the open, siccing dogs on them, and now, parading them naked on the streets. The simple logic that two wrongs never make one right seems incomprehensible to our ‘jurists’.

by Razeshta Sethna

For most governments that have come and gone, Pakistan’s women haven’t mattered. Gaunt and broken, fifty-something Shahnaz Bibi was paraded naked in her village of Neelor Bala in Haripur district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in June.

Her son was accused of having an affair with a married woman, but it was Shahnaz who was punished when some influential men of the area decided to take matters into their own hands. The devastating impact of male-dominated parallel justice systems have destroyed, and taken, the lives of Pakistani women.

By Manzoor Ali

Nine-year-old schoolgirl Sohana Javed looks on during a press conference in Taimargara, Lower Dir. PHOTO: AFP

PESHAWAR: In a shocking affront to child dignity across the country, a nine-year-old girl was kidnapped on her way to school some days ago and forced to wear a suicide vest by her captors on Monday.