Gender-based violence and our judicial officers

A man who reports a stolen wallet is not asked what he was wearing when he lost it, or what business he had on that street at that hour. That line of questioning, considered routine when a woman reports violence, is not seen as intrusive. It is seen as relevant. It is defended in the name of religion, culture, and an honour that is somehow always stored in the body of someone else: the sinf-e-nazuk, who is simultaneously held responsible for everything. This is not prejudice at the fringes. It is normalised which is what makes it so difficult to see, including for a trained, skilled judge. Judges are not above the society that shaped them. They are its microcosm, and what a society normalises, its courtrooms can quietly enforce.

Today sinf is a familiar word. After the drama series Sinf-e-Aahan, it has entered everyday conversation. Till 1999, it had no standard Urdu equivalent. I spent years introducing the concept through research, training workshops, and Gender Watch – a 19-episode series on PTV that won the channel's first Excellence Award for Private Production working to give language to a way of thinking our justice system urgently needed. Globally, between 27% and 30% of women experience intimate partner violence over their lifetimes; in many jurisdictions fewer than one in ten reported cases result in conviction.

Of Pakistan's 3,142 judges and judicial officers, 572 are women i.e. 18 per cent of the total. Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa leads the subordinate judiciary with roughly a quarter of positions held by women. Progress below, absence above – above where the decisions that shape everything else are made.

Pakistan sits at the far end of that gap: conviction rates for domestic violence, rape and so-called honour killings remain in the low single digits. The Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey recorded physical intimate partner violence at 57% in K-P – the highest of any province, with Balochistan close behind, and Punjab and Sindh lower but far from reassuring. In rural areas, the numbers are worse.

The Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act, 2026 – formally passed in January 2026 – signals long-delayed movement on protections in the ICT after fifteen years of political resistance. Whether it translates into protection depends less on its passage than on its enforcement.

In 1999, I began documenting cases of violence against women using newspaper reports and FIRs among the first studies of this kind in Pakistan. What those records showed then still holds: they are the tip of the iceberg. The FIR is the tip of that. I have since spent three decades at the non-glamorous intersections where gender-based violence meets law, policy, public health and institutional practice, training police officers, media, NGO, health professionals, parliamentarians and judicial officers. One thing has not changed: a woman who survives violence and reaches a courtroom has already cleared an enormous distance. Whether the law meets her there depends on what the judge carries inside.

Campaigns on social media gather views. Captivating music and colourful placards do not change courtroom data. Visibility and accountability are not the same thing.

Judicial discretion in bail, sentencing, evidence, custody is inherently interpretive. Unconscious bias shapes that interpretation. Judges who apply the law without awareness of bias are not more objective; they are simply less aware of the filter through which they are applying it.

In Pakistani courts, three forms operate at once. 1) Explicit bias surfaces in the ruling that cites family honour to reduce a sentence, or calls a survivor a woman of loose character. 2) Implicit bias is quieter. A woman's credibility is formed before a word of testimony is heard, and her dress and demeanour is treated as evidence the record does not contain. 3) Structural bias lives in procedure: men speaking for women in court even when the woman is the aggrieved party; FIR delay read as dishonesty rather than trauma; case withdrawal taken at face value, the coercion behind it never examined.

Jirga, panchayat and other parallel systems carry deep community authority but courts are constitutionally bound to ensure no harmful cultural practice violates fundamental rights. Rulings that compel marriage, deny inheritance or sanction violence are not legally enforceable, and the Supreme Court has said so, repeatedly. These patterns appear in documented rulings across provinces, repeated long enough to pass as normal.

Pakistan's Constitution is unambiguous: Article 25 mandates equality regardless of gender; Article 9 guarantees the right to life without exception; and CEDAW places a state duty on eliminating discriminatory practices. This is not about importing foreign values. Gender justice is rooted in Pakistan's own Constitution and in Islamic principles that have always prohibited oppression. These are our commitments not someone else's.

What the bench can do is concrete. Before pronouncing, ask whether the reasoning responds to evidence or to assumption. Remove "loose character", "provoked" and "family matter" from orders and replace them with facts, law and precedent. In custody matters, apply the child's best interest not the gender of the parent. Reverse the genders in your own reasoning: if it would not survive that, examine why.

Courts are not only of law. They are of people and people are not perfect. That is why conscience cannot be kept silent. Conscience does not pronounce the verdict but it determines (or should determine) how the law is read: with bias, or with justice.

So the questions remain. How long will the survivor stand in the dock of her own case? How many times will a woman be labelled kari/kali while the real perpetrator disappears into the background? How long will domestic violence be called a private matter and quietly filed away? How long will a rape survivor be made to feel like the accused?

Every word in a judgment tells society who the law is for. That message is not written by campaigns or placards. It is written by the judge in each order, in each courtroom, across this country.