Activists for women's rights had feared he would be acquitted, since his parents had absolved him of blame, a factor Pakistani courts often take into account.
Psychologists who work with sex offenders say many men try to use the sex addiction label as a way to abdicate responsibility for actions that are illegal and abusive.
As a result, the scientific studies of the era often failed to find clear evidence of serious pathology and had the perverse effect of exonerating the cigarette.
But the right's knee-jerk response—that this is criminality, pure and simple, and that to seek a deeper explanation is to excuse the culprits—is also wrong.