Express News: Nearly 62 per cent of Hindu and Christian women fear that a majority of Muslims would not come to their aid if they were being discriminated against.
This was one of the findings of the study “Life on the Margins,” which was released by the National Commission for Justice and Peace at the Pakistan Medical Association House on Tuesday. The study is based on interviews of 1,000 women in 26 districts of Punjab and Sindh from 2010 and 2011.
Forty-three per cent of the women surveyed complained that they faced religious discrimination at either their workplace, educational institution or neighbourhood, while 27 per cent of them faced difficulties in gaining admissions to educational institutions. A majority of non-Muslim children polled said that they were forced to study Islamiat in school. Of the working women, 76 per cent said that they had to deal with sexual harassment.
The report points out that the literacy rate of these women is 47 per cent, which is below the 57 per cent national literacy rate. The infant mortality rate among minority communities turned out to be 314 infant deaths for every 3,050 live births, or 10.30 per cent, which is higher when compared with the World Health Organisation’s figure of the 8.7 per cent national infant mortality rate.
Categories: Asia, Human Rights, Human values, Pakistan