Islamabad, Oct 15 (IANS) Between 2021 and 2025, 237,216 crimes against women and girls were recorded in Pakistan, local media reported, citing an Islamabad-based human rights group, as violence against women continues to escalate.
In its National Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Crime Report 2021–2025, the Peace and Justice Network (PJN) Pakistan has presented a disturbing picture of violence against women and girls under its National Data for Justice Development (D4JD) Initiative.
Understanding the true scale of gender-based violence across Pakistan requires examining both what provincial statistics reveal and what they obscure, Pakistan Observer reported.
As per the findings, Punjab accounted for a staggering 82.5 per cent (195,787 cases) of all police-reported gender-based violence (GBV) crimes in Pakistan, despite comprising 51.5 per cent of the country’s population.
The report further revealed that Punjab accounted for more than 90 per cent of all nationally registered cases of gang rape, custodial sexual violence and incest.
Meanwhile, Sindh recorded 25,107 GBV cases, representing 10.6 per cent of the national total during the five-year period. Kidnapping and abduction dominated the province’s reported gender crimes, accounting for 19,289 cases, or approximately 77 per cent of the total.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), which accounts for 16.5 per cent of Pakistan’s population, reported 10,210 cases, just 4.3 per cent of the national total. However, the relatively low reporting figures mask a grim reality: of the 2,334 domestic violence cases reported to police, 1,197 resulted in murder, the findings revealed.
Additionally, Balochistan recorded 3,108 cases, followed by Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) with 1,572 cases and Pakistan-occupied Gilgit-Baltistan (PoGB) with 161 cases, with the figures reflecting severe institutional and geographical barriers to reporting violence.
The mere seven rape cases registered in PoGB over five years may reflect severe underreporting amid tightly knit communal structures and geographic isolation rather than absence of violence. In PoK, the data are heavily skewed towards kidnapping and abduction, with 1,474 of 1,572 cases falling into these categories, while domestic physical violence remains largely invisible in police records.
Expressing grave concerns over the alarming figures, the Voice of Pakistan Minority (VOPM) said, “These are not isolated tragedies. They reveal a society in which violence follows women from their homes into public life and then into a justice system too slow, too weak, and too indifferent to protect them. A woman should not need to be murdered before the state recognises that she was in danger.”
Emphasising that Pakistan does not have a women’s safety problem alone, the rights body said, “It has a governance failure, a policing failure, and a moral failure. Every unreported case is a woman the state failed to reach. Every delayed investigation is a perpetrator it failed to deter. And every woman who fears going to the police is proof that Pakistan’s promise of equal citizenship remains unfinished.”
–IANS
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