Claim: A picture shows a participant of Aurat March 2022 carrying a placard with text that reads, “God please give me a penis I want to rape men.”
Fact: The image is originally from 2018 and the text has been edited onto it. The poster, in fact, featured text that read, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fundamental Human Rights.” The poster contained no reference to men or rape.
On 9 March 2022, Twitter user @RudeDreamer00 wrote, “It means if you would have penis then rape is fine, but now you don’t have penis so rape is a crime ….. Very nice Kuch sharm kro [Very nice have some shame] #AuratMarch”. The tweet was accompanied by an image showing an Aurat March participant with a poster that reads, “God please give a penis I want to rape men”.
The photo appeared to be doctored as multiple people flagged it to Soch Fact Check, which is why we decided to verify it. Additionally, in the days leading up to and following the yearly Aurat March, such posts appear frequently. The women’s march is often targeted with disinformation campaigns that fuel backlash against the event and put the lives of those associated with it into jeopardy.
Soch Fact Check has previously debunked numerous claims about Pakistan’s Aurat March, including viral posts claiming that a majority of Pakistanis agree the march should be banned, reports on a quote by Prince Charles about women’s rights and Islam, images of allegedly blasphemous banners, slogans and other doctored posters, as well as news of a rally allegedly held by a group of religious parties alongside Aurat March 2020 in Islamabad.
Fact or fiction?
Soch Fact Check used Google Lens and Google Reverse Image Search to figure out if the placard visible in the picture in question is from Aurat March 2022 or previous women’s marches in Pakistan. We also checked if any portion of the image matched with posters carried by participants in prior years using TinEye Reverse Image Search.
The TinEye search led us to two reports from 2018, the year of the Aurat March’s inception in Karachi. Both reports were published by the Dawn Group of Newspapers — one on its Urdu-language website Dawn News TV and the other on its lifestyle platform, Images — detailing the first-ever such event in Pakistan.
Screenshots of the articles published by Dawn News TV (L) and Images (R) that carry the image with the original poster
The Google Lens results included articles carried by PakiHolic, Mangobaaz, and Girls.pk, as well as Kurdish-language Turkish press agency Bianet and blockchain-based blogging social media platform Steemit.
(L-R) The original image; the cropped version of the original image in the size it appears in in the doctored version; and the doctored version that has gone viral on social media
The poster was also photographed by the author of this fact check for Geo.tv from a different angle, when the marchers took to the Abdullah Haroon Road in Karachi’s Red Zone.
The original poster from a different angle, photographed by the author of this fact check in 2018 for Geo.tv
The original text on the poster in fact read, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fundamental Human Rights”. The caption is a reference to American singer Cyndi Lauper’s song from 1983, “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” and is often used in women’s rights movements. It contained no reference to men or rape, proving that the image currently circulating has been doctored.
Virality
The doctored image went more viral on Twitter than Facebook and was posted by multiple accounts such as @RudeDreamer00, @SheikhThanos, @listener__47, @saqlainiqbal_7, @coronabaji, @DrYasminSana, and @Shaddy_shahzada.
On Facebook, users ‘محمد علی اعوان’, ‘Safi Khan’, and ‘Nawab Khan’ shared the edited image.
Conclusion: The viral photograph from 2022 is, in fact, from 2018 and the poster shown in it has been doctored. The original text of the poster read as follows, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fundamental Human Rights.”