Hafizabad’s morning quiet was broken when a mother found her 13-year-old daughter weeping outside her school. She said men on a motorcycle had dragged her to a house where one raped her while others stood guard before dumping her back outside.
By the time the case surfaced, only one suspect had been arrested, while two unidentified suspects remained wanted. The FIR cited sections 375-A and 365-B of the Pakistan Penal Code, and police said the medical examination had provided evidence of sexual assault. The story is as sickening as it is familiar.
The Sustainable Social Development Organisation counted 32,617 incidents of gender-based violence in 2024 and recorded 5,339 rape complaints. Punjab alone reported 4,641 rape cases, with the conviction rate at only 0.5 per cent. All this is a public confession that the system is still easier for accused men to survive than for survivors to navigate.
Pakistan does not lack laws. It lacks enforcement. The anti-rape ordinance introduced after national outrage in 2020 promised specialised courts, survivor protection, an offender database and faster trials. Its most dramatic proposal, chemical castration for serial offenders, was later dropped from the 2021 law after widespread objections. These pages have repeatedly questioned whether the state remains blind to its duty to protect women. The question now feels too polite. A country where girls can be abducted on the way to school, assaulted and returned to the same public space as if nothing happened cannot keep calling each case an aberration. The real disgrace is not only the crime. It is the normalisation that follows, including but not limited to the whispered family pressure, the hostile cross-examination and a police case that weakens long before the accused enters court.
There is one model worth expanding: Anti-Rape Crisis Cells. Supported by UN Women and Pakistani authorities, these one-stop centres place medical care, forensic evidence collection, counselling, legal aid and police reporting under one roof.
Centres in Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Multan and Rawalpindi have already served hundreds of survivors, including children. Their value is practical as they reduce the exhausting movement between hospitals, police stations and courts at the very moment when the survivor is most vulnerable. The larger fight against sexual violence now requires boring, expensive, unglamorous reform: crisis cells in every district, trained women medico-legal officers, functioning forensic labs, survivor protection, time-bound trials and consequences for negligent investigators. Every new tragedy forces Pakistan to choose between performative outrage and a justice system that finally believes its daughters. *