In a dusty village in Pakistan’s Punjab province, the quiet life of a Christian mother of five was shattered on a summer afternoon—violated not only by one man’s monstrous crime, but by a society that looked the other way.
On June 11, in Chak No. 134/16L village in Khanewal District, 36-year-old [name withheld] was resting alone in her modest home. Her five children had gone to their grandparents’ house. Her body ached with illness, and she hoped the silence would offer relief. But through that silence crept a terror she had feared for over a year—Rashid Anwaar.
He had stalked her in broad daylight, harassed her with demands to convert to Islam, and threatened her with violence if she didn’t agree to marry him. Her husband, Indrias Paulus, a brick kiln laborer, had pleaded with Anwaar’s family to intervene. But no one cared to stop him.
That afternoon, Anwaar entered her home through an open door, locked the room from inside, and raped her at gunpoint.
“She tried to run,” Indrias said, his voice cracking, “but he tore her clothes. He told her he would kill her if she screamed.”
Indrias and his brother-in-law, Pervaiz, had come home for lunch and were horrified to hear her cries from the locked room. They pounded on the door. When it opened, it wasn’t her they saw first, but him. Gun in hand, Anwaar walked out, pointed his weapon at them, and vanished over the boundary wall. In his haste, he dropped his phone and left his motorcycle behind.
Inside the room, they found her—shaking, broken, devastated.
Police were called, a report was filed, and evidence collected. But justice did not come swiftly. The delay in Anwaar’s arrest allowed him to seek pre-arrest bail, exploiting the system as so many predators do. Only after three days and relentless pressure from the family and rights activists was he finally arrested.
Even then, the family wasn’t informed.
“She cries every night,” Indrias said. “She can’t sleep. She can’t even face our children.”
Their eldest son, just sixteen, keeps asking what happened. She has no answer.
“How do I tell him,” she whispers, her voice hollow, “that his mother was defiled by a man who believed his religion and power made me nothing?”
This is not just a story of one woman. This is a story of every Christian, Hindu, and minority girl in Pakistan who walks in fear. Rights activist Joseph Janssen calls this case “a tragic but familiar reminder of the dangerous intersection of gender-based violence and religious persecution.”
“This wasn’t just rape,” Janssen said. “This was a hate crime. A message. That her faith, her dignity, her body—they were his for the taking.”
And in a society where silence protects power, and victims live in fear, the fight for justice becomes a second trauma. But the family is not backing down.
Yet no legal battle can erase what happened. No verdict will take away the terror she felt, or the trust shattered in her children’s eyes.
All she wanted was to live in peace.
And for that, she paid with everything.