Two more female medical students in Sindh have come forward with complaints of sexual harassments and abuse, saying that the police and university administration did nothing to protect them from the alleged assault.
Both women alluded to the worrying trend of harassment and blackmail faced by female medical students, with several reported cases already ending in murder or suicide, while addressing a rally held by Journalists, Writers, Civil Society for Truth, Peace and Justice (JWC) in protest of the same.
Almas Behan, one of the women, said she quit her studies after the administration at Sindh University did nothing when she reported she was being harassed, and had almost been kidnapped. Instead, she claimed that university officials formed a probe committee which they used to intimidate her, and police raided her home. She said incidents like these discouraged girls from rural backgrounds like herself from pursuing higher education.
Similarly, Parveen Rind, a house officer at the nursing school of Peoples University of Medical and Health Sciences, Nawabshah (PUMHS) said that she had been tormented by men at her hostel, who eventually tried to ‘beat her to death’ after she refused to comply with their demands. She also said that university administration were protecting her abusers and that the university’s Vice Chancellor Dr Gulshan Ali Memon did not take any action in response to her official complaint.
Earlier this month, Parveen highlighted the dangerous conditions for female medical students in Sindh in a video interview which first shed light on the scourge of harassments. She claimed that the series of mysterious deaths of medical students at hostels across Sindh, which had previously been ruled suicides, were in fact murders committed by varsity officials. It emerged several days later that DNA samples found on the bodies of two medical students who had died under dubious circumstances, Dr Noshreen Kazmi and Dr Nimrata Kumrati, matched, indicating that the same man had likely raped and killed both students.
