Filmmaker Wants To Stop Fathers From Giving Up Their Daughters
July 01, 2015 8:47 AM ET

She fights for the rights of women by telling stories about heroic men.

"The struggle to end violence against women has always been carried out by women activists," says Samar Minallah Khan, who makes documentaries about gender-based violence in her native Pakistan.

"Women have worked very hard to bring awareness, but it will never be enough." That's why she brings men into the picture. And her approach has won acclaim from both men and women.

Khan is one of five women honored with a Global Leadership Award by Vital Voices, a group founded by Hillary Clinton after the World Conference of Women in Beijing in 1995. At the presentation ceremony, held at the Kennedy Center last month, a packed house of women gave her a standing ovation when she dedicated the award to the men in her life: "my amazing supportive and loving father, my husband, my brothers and my son."

Khan's films focus primarily on the practice of swara, where a daughter is given away as compensation for a crime. Swara happens mainly in poor, rural areas.

An anthropologist and documentarian who grew up in Pakistan but was educated in England, she started investigating swara in the early 2000s. The more she learned, the more upset she became. In 2003, her documentary Swara — A Bridge Over Troubled Water, profiled victims and their families.

Khan went into rural regions and spoke with men who had been forced to give a daughter or sister away as compensation for a crime or to settle a family feud. Her work challenged the norms in very traditional areas of Pakistan; she faced intimidation and death threats. And she still does. Most of the initial footage for her most recent documentary on swara was unusable because the cameraman was shaking from fear.

Those challenges have led Khan to find an unlikely protagonist for her documentaries. Over and over, she was impressed by the men who opposed this practice.

"Men, too, face hurdles for speaking up and for challenging norms," she says. "Standing up in the face of society and country expectations, that takes a lot of courage."

She tells the story of one father who had committed a crime against someone in his community. The crime victim wanted the father's daughter in compensation. Khan says the father came to her with tears in his eyes, saying he would rather give away all of his possessions, all his land and money, than lose his daughter. In the end, he gave away all of his money and many of his possessions but kept his child at home.

Such stories weren't being told before Khan started making her documentaries.

In her documentaries, Samar Minallah Khan focuses on men to change the way women are treated.

"There is a theory that stories are based on ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances," says Khan. "I choose instead to make films about ordinary people in ordinary circumstances that make the extraordinary choice."

In 2004, in response to her documentary, Pakistan officially outlawed swara. No longer can women legally be given as compensation for crimes. The punishment for offenders is three to 10 years in jail.

"You can never underestimate the power of law," she says. "But it's too soon to see how it will be implemented."

Khan has continued to make documentaries that shine a light on this practice, and she actively works to raise awareness about the law. In the rural tribal regions of Pakistan, changing the opinions of the powerful is as important as changing the laws.

And almost as difficult.

At the Kennedy Center ceremony, videos highlighted the work of the five honorees. Khan's video featured interviews with young men wrestling with the changing culture in Pakistan.

As one young man said, "It boils down to what is seen by boys of this age as being cool. Being cool is being independent, being straight-faced and wearing dark sunglasses. But maybe in a decade, being cool is being a feminist."

Until feminism is cool in rural Pakistan, Kahn will keep advocating for women - by working with men.

SassyEuro posted >>>
2OLD,
I read this, did a little research .. 2 hrs was all I could handle. To call this issue " disturbing " would be an understatement.
I had one of those moments of ...
" I thought I heard everything ".

This topic lead into "honor killings " also disgusting & infuriating.
Especially reading actual cases of both. I am speechless & reluctant to post links at the moment.

But thank you, for making me aware of this evil. Helpless as I feel to do anything to help... at least I'm MORE grateful for my own life & all my female relatives here & for our freedoms. .

Blood, Fear and Ritual: Witness to Female Circumcision in ...
[time.com/3425529/...and-ritual-witness-to-female-circumcision-in-kenya

Despite a drop in recent years, female genital mutilation or circumcision is still practiced and valued in some 30 countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, ...

SassyEuro posted >>>
Most I knew. But, the extent of the Swara ,I did not know. I didn't know that many are not aware of the law. And that it is so demented, that if is actually swapping one sex crime for another as some kind of twisted debt.

Honor killings - I did not know the list of pitiful excuses for it was so long & ludicrous. Example: 4 women were executed in 2007 for " clapping their hands " at a wedding. Some one video taped them doing it. And they were apaulding a NON male relative dance at someone's wedding.
Insanity & insecurity & control.... running rampant. Evil, simply evil

History Has Been Made.
Female Genital Mutilation Banned In Nigeria
Kimberley Richards - Jun 03, 2015
"More than 130 million girls and women have experienced female genital mutilation or cutting ..."

Nigeria made history by outlawing female genital mutilation. The ban falls under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015 that was passed in Senate on May 5 and recently enacted into law.

This was one of the last acts by the outgoing president, Goodluck Jonathan. His successor, Muhammadu Buhari, was sworn into office this past Friday, May 29.
Female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) is the act of either partially or totally removing the external female genitalia or causing injury to the female genital organs for non-medical purposes.

According to UNICEF:

"More than 130 million girls and women have experienced FGM/C in 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is most common."

With the help of community activism, campaigns and numbers of organizational efforts to end this practice, UNICEF reported that teenage girls were now one-third less likely to undergo FGM/C today than 30 years ago.

Now with the new law criminalizing this procedure, the hope is the ban will fully eliminate this practice and be strongly enforced to combat any existing societal pressures.

The World Health Organization cites immediate harmful effects of FCM/C that include hemorrhage (bleeding), bacterial infection, open sores, and long-term consequences that include infertility, childbirth complications and recurring bladder infections.

In another UNICEF report, communities who practice FGM often do so to reduce sexual desire in women and to initiate girls to womanhood, among other purposes.

According to "The Guardian's" analysis of 2014 UN data, a quarter of the women in Nigeria have undergone FGM.

Stella Mukasa, director of Gender, Violence and Rights at the International Center for Research on Women, explains the complexity of the implementation of the new law banning FGM/C.

"It is crucial that we scale up efforts to change traditional cultural views that underpin violence against women," she wrote in an article for "The Guardian." "Only then will this harmful practice be eliminated.”

The Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act serves to protect women and violence in multiple aspects. BuzzFeed News cited a 2013 version of the bill that highlights its purpose to eliminate violence both in private and public, and end physical, sexual, domestic and psychological violence.