Violence against women and children in Pakistan spiked in 2021 and 2022, with an exponential number of cases registered in Punjab, Sindh, and Islamabad according to a recent report by the Sustainable Social Development Organization (SSDO).
The findings are based on its report ‘State of Violence against Women & Children in Pakistan: District Wise Analysis’ which provides accurate data on the prevalence and statistics of violence against women and children. The report is published bi-annually, with the data from 2020 and 2021 collected from media tracking of Pakistan’s six most widely read newspapers (three Urdu and three English) and data from the government for cases officially registered with the police (by filing Right to Information (RTI) requests).
The data it had collected from the police showed that violence against women and children had skyrocketed over the last two years.
Crimes Against Children
The cases in Punjab multiplied by 255 percent from 7,239 in 2020 to 25,751 in 2021, which should ring alarm bells for practical legislation and the concerned authorities to exercise the existing laws.
Child abuse increased by 15 percent while child labor went up by 95 percent. While this burgeoning cycle of crimes against children has no definite pattern across the province, the frequencies vary from district to district. This social deviancy has, notwithstanding, extended its tentacles into the bustling cosmopolitan lifestyle and the run-down city dwellings.
Crimes Against Women
A comparative analysis showed a 14 percent increase in the number of rape cases of women going from 3,772 to 4,329, which is still believed to be vastly underreported. Similarly, there was a 47 percent surge in honor killings which jumped from 134 to 197.
Unlike Punjab, Sindh had a reduction in some major indicators despite large increases in other indicators.
Crimes Against Children
The biggest increase observed was in child abuse for which the number of cases officially registered with the police snowballed from 90 in 2020 to 444 in 2021. With a shocking increase of 393.33 percent in just one year, cases of abuse against children have almost quadrupled in the province.
Fortunately, there was a decrease in the number of child marriages which went from 26 in 2020 to 15 in 2021 — a drop of almost 42.31 percent.
Data on the rapes of women remained the most consistent, with 238 cases registered in 2020 and 234 in 2021, showing a very minor decrease of 1.68 percent, which, like in Punjab, is believed to be underreported.
Crimes Against Women
Regarding the crimes against both women and children, the highest frequency was seen in the kidnapping of women, with the number of cases was in triple digits in 2020 and 2021. There was also a staggering 94.68 percent growth from 1,334 cases registered in 2020 to 2,597 cases in 2021, indicating a two-fold increase.
An encouraging detail was the 32.48 percent reduction of honor killings in Sindh with 157 cases in 2020 that dropped to 106 in 2021. However, just the fact that honor killings remain prevalent is a major cause for concern. Amongst the majority of the indicators, larger urban metropolises such as Karachi, Hyderabad, and Larkana registered the highest number of cases of this crime.
Violence Against Women
The federal capital had the highest increase in the percentage of rapes of women and violence against women, where the cases more than tripled between 2020 and 2021. The reported number rape cases went from 23 in 2020 to 97 in 2021 — a leap of 321.74 percent.
Unfortunately, domestic violence also rose by 178.57 percent, with a substantial change from 14 cases in 2020 to 39 cases the previous year.
Similarly, the cases of violence against women went from 38 in 2020 to 165 last year, showing a disconcerting escalation of 334.21 percent.
Child Abuse
It was found that child abuse cases had also more than doubled from 48 in 2020 to 108 in last year.
The report ‘State of Violence against Women & Children in Pakistan: District Wise Analysis’ is the first of its kind in which data collection is not based on estimates or projections but is obtained from official data gathered from the police in terms of registered FIRs. With the data it collected in 2020 and 2021, the SSDO launched a short comparative analysis of the official number of cases registered by the police in Punjab, Sindh, and Islamabad. The governments of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan could only provide six months’ worth of data for 2021 and were excluded from the comparative analysis.
The SSDO officially launched the annual report for 2021, as well as comparative analyses and key statistics on 18 March. The statistics on violence against women and children showed dismal results, with a stark increase in cases in 2020 besides a large increase from the first half of the year.
The Special Assistant to the Chief Minister of Punjab on Information and Special Initiatives, Hasaan Khawar, commended the SSDO’s effort in collecting this comprehensive and exhaustive collection of data from official sources. He remarked that it is a great starting point in understanding the key hotspots where violence needs to be reined from escalating.
The number of cases reported by the media was dwarfed by the actual number of cases, demonstrating that the majority get no media traction.
The annual report for 2021 also revealed that a record 52,370 cases were reported across all the indicators concerning women and children’s social wellbeing, and only 8,719 were reported by the media. It also brought to light that violence against women is rampant in the country with an official record of 27,273 reported cases.
Among the provinces, Punjab peaked with 25,751 officially registered cases that constituted more than half of the reported cases of violence against women, but the media could only report 3,160 cases of them. There were also 128 registered cases of violence against women in Islamabad, 40 of which were highlighted by the media.
The total number of such reported crimes also indicated a hiked 18,390 kidnappings of women. The mainstream media had tracked only 2,699 cases of kidnapping of women in the period under review but it is indicative of the colossal difference in the treatment of the cases in the media and their official numbers. The highest number of kidnappings of women registered in Islamabad (177) were contrary to the much smaller number of (68) that the media chose to highlight although Islamabad has the largest media outlets (print and electronic).
The statistics are perturbing but it also shows that the reporting mechanism for violence against women and children is improving on the provincial level. There is also a need for the development of a prosecution mechanism and to increase the conviction rate to prevent the increase of such crimes.
Executive Director SSDO, Syed Kausar Abbas, commented, “Cases of violence against women and children are continuously on the rise as demonstrated by the data. This is despite the fact that we believe that in many cases, there may be underreporting. Not only do we need greater transparency in sharing of this data, we also need a swifter resolution of pending cases”.
Chairperson Standing Committee on Gender Mainstreaming, Uzma Kardaar, underlined that the statistics are a cause for concern but will help in devising a mechanism to counter violence against women and children in the hotspot districts. She added that it is necessary to declare an emergency to address these cases urgently to avoid their repetition.