A Karachi court, on Friday, in unusually direct language, described a crime that Pakistan prefers to overlook, when it convicted a man under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act for sending a woman’s sexually explicit videos to her in-laws, sentenced him to three years on three counts to run concurrently, imposed fines and ordered compensation, and recorded that the case was “a classic example of patriarchal, facile masculinity and misogynistic approach” in a society where a man cannot accept refusal, and that “NO” always remains “NO.”
The force of that observation lies in what the court recognised about method. The offence was not the existence of the videos alone, though that is how the law still tends to process it, nor was it only their circulation, though that triggers the penal code. It was the choice of the audience. Those videos were sent to the victim’s in-laws, a detail that shifts the entire character of the crime, because in Pakistan, a family is not a neutral recipient of information: it is an adjudicating body, the judge, jury and the executioner.
Courts have previously convicted men under the same law for circulating intimate material to fiancés, relatives and employers in order to coerce or punish women, including a six-year sentence in 2018 for online harassment and blackmail in Lahore and another such conviction in Karachi for sharing indecent images and videos of a woman with her fiancé.
The technology has, however, terrifyingly changed the speed and reach.
Even the official numbers now make it impossible to deny the scale of the problem. Complaints of technology-facilitated abuse have crossed into the hundreds of thousands annually, while independent helplines have recorded thousands of cases of image-based abuse, impersonation and coercion, the overwhelming majority reported by women.
The law, on its face, is not silent. PECA criminalises the transmission of intimate images without consent, offences against dignity and modesty, and cyberstalking, and allows data preservation and content removal. What it does not yet do with sufficient clarity is recognise compound harm. When intimate material is sent to a woman’s in-laws, fiancé or employer, the act is no longer only a breach of privacy. It becomes a targeted attempt to trigger social exclusion, to collapse her standing within the very networks she depends on and to weaponise the idea of honour against her.
An ongoing television drama is brilliantly capturing the cultural dilemmas that courts are only beginning to confront: in the digital age, exposure is instantaneous, and punishment is often delivered long before the law arrives.
That is where the significance of this ruling lies–not in the sentence, which remains modest when set against the scale of harm, but in the court’s willingness to describe the offence as an extension of patriarchal control rather than an incidental misuse of technology. *