Blaming the Victim

When a young, illiterate housewife named Zafran Bibi went to the police last year, pregnant and claiming a fellow villager had raped her while she was cutting grass, she didn't expect that she'd be the one to get punished. But last month, a judge in Pakistan's ultra-conservative Northwest Frontier province convicted her of adultery. "I hereby convict and sentence the accused Zafran Bibi to stoning to death," wrote Judge Anwar Ali Khan, "and that she be stoned to death at a public place."

If Pakistan is sometimes a bizarre blend of the modern and the archaic, nowhere is...