Gender Violence Crisis in Pakistan: Women's Safety Challenges Across South Asia

A Night at Minar-e-Pakistan — and What It Revealed

On the night of August 14, 2021, Pakistan's Independence Day, a crowd of hundreds of men at Minar-e-Pakistan in Lahore attacked a female TikTok content creator and her companions. The assault was filmed by bystanders. Videos spread rapidly across social media. Within days, the incident had become an international story — not because it was unusual, but because it was documented. What the cameras captured was not an aberration. It was the visible surface of a structural crisis that runs through Pakistan, Bangladesh, and across South Asia: a pervasive, systematic failure to protect women from violence, and a criminal justice apparatus that consistently fails to hold perpetrators accountable.

More than three years later, the data confirms that what happened that night at Minar-e-Pakistan represents a regional pattern, not an isolated event. Pakistan recorded 32,617 cases of gender-based violence in 2024 alone. In Bangladesh, 76 percent of women have experienced intimate partner violence in their lifetime. South Asia as a region remains one of the most dangerous in the world for women — despite significant economic development, legislative reform, and institutional progress in multiple dimensions of human rights.

Pakistan's Gender Violence Crisis: The 2024 Data

The Sustainable Social Development Organization's March 2025 report — "Mapping Gender-Based Violence in Pakistan 2024" — provides the most comprehensive recent picture of the crisis's scale. The 32,617 officially reported cases break down into 24,439 cases of kidnapping and abduction, 5,339 incidents of rape, 2,238 cases of domestic violence, and 547 honour killings. Punjab recorded the highest absolute number, with 26,753 cases, reflecting both its population size and comparatively higher reporting infrastructure. The report notes, however, that fewer than 10 percent of victims seek justice — meaning the true scale of gender-based violence is almost certainly ten or more times larger than reported figures suggest.

The conviction rates are the most damning numbers. Across Pakistan, the national conviction rate for rape stands at 0.5 percent. Honour killings: 0.5 percent. Kidnapping and abduction: 0.1 percent. Domestic violence: 1.3 percent. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan recorded over 60,000 cases of violence against women and children in Punjab alone in 2024, but only 924 suspects were convicted. Between 2021 and 2024, the Human Rights Minister informed the National Assembly, more than 7,500 women were killed — including 1,553 in honour killings.

Pakistan's legislative framework on paper is substantive. The Women Protection Bill of 2006, the Domestic Violence Prevention and Protection Acts in Sindh and Balochistan, the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act 2016, and criminal code amendments recognizing honour crimes as punishable offenses represent genuine legislative progress. UNFPA notes that Pakistan has one of the better normative legal frameworks for gender-based violence in the region. The gap between law and enforcement, however, is not a gap — it is a chasm. Police reluctance to intervene in domestic violence cases, treating them as private family matters; judicial delays that exhaust survivors' resources and resolve; powerful tribal and political connections that shield perpetrators in Balochistan and rural Punjab; a culture of stigma that silences most victims before they ever reach any institution — together these factors produce conviction rates that effectively mean impunity is the default outcome for perpetrators of gender violence in Pakistan.

The Minar-e-Pakistan Incident in Context: Public Space as a Site of Violence

What made the 2021 Lahore attack so striking — and so symbolically resonant — was its setting. Minar-e-Pakistan is Pakistan's most significant national monument, the site where the 1940 Lahore Resolution was passed, the foundational political declaration of the Pakistan movement. The attack occurred on Independence Day, in a massive public crowd, in broad view. The victim had come to celebrate a national holiday.

The incident illustrated two specific dynamics that characterize public gender violence in Pakistan. First, mob impunity: the attack involved hundreds of participants, yet the initial response from both bystanders and authorities reflected the normalized tolerance of violence against women in public. Second, the role of social media: videos spread rapidly, eventually forcing a law enforcement response — police arrested a number of suspects — but the case also demonstrated how digital documentation, while creating accountability pressure, does not by itself change structural impunity. Social media virality can force arrests; it cannot reform prosecution systems, judicial processes, or the cultural norms that make such attacks conceivable.

Digital violence is itself a growing dimension of gender-based violence in Pakistan. Around 90 percent of harassment complaints filed with Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency are submitted by women. Seventy percent of female students report experiencing online harassment. Pakistan's gender violence crisis has migrated from physical spaces into digital ones — and the same institutional failures that characterize the physical domain apply online.

Bangladesh: A Different Legal Landscape, Similar Underlying Patterns

Bangladesh's relationship with Pakistan is historically complex — shaped by the 1971 Liberation War and its aftermath, by decades of bilateral tension, and more recently by diplomatic recalibration. But when it comes to gender-based violence, the two countries share structural similarities that transcend their political differences.

Bangladesh's 2024 Violence Against Women Survey — the largest survey of its kind globally, covering 27,476 women across all eight divisions and including, for the first time, slum and disaster-prone areas — presents a striking picture. Three in four Bangladeshi women (76 percent) have experienced at least one form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime. In the past 12 months alone, 49 percent of women experienced such violence. The most common forms are controlling behavior, affecting 68 percent of women, and emotional violence at 37 percent, but physical violence affects 47 percent over a lifetime. More than 54 percent of women have experienced physical or sexual violence by husbands at some point. During pregnancy, 7.2 percent of married women faced physical violence.

There are meaningful differences between Bangladesh and Pakistan. Bangladesh's survey methodology is more comprehensive — the 2024 report is the third iteration of a nationally standardized survey, allowing trend analysis. It shows progress: the overall prevalence of recent intimate partner violence declined from 66 percent in 2015 to 49 percent in 2024, a 17-percentage-point reduction over a decade. Bangladesh also ranks highest in South Asia on the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index. The country has had female prime ministers, strong female representation in the garment sector workforce, and significant institutional investment in gender equality metrics. Human Rights Watch noted in January 2026 that despite progress, police data showed gender-based violence increased between January and June 2025 compared to the same period in 2024 — partly attributable to activity by hardline religious groups opposing the interim government's gender equality initiatives.

The culture of silence parallels Pakistan's. In Bangladesh, 64 percent of women who experienced physical or sexual violence from their husbands never told anyone. Only 12 percent were aware of the government's Helpline 109. Only 48.5 percent of women said they knew where to report violence at all.

The Regional Pattern: South Asia's Shared Structural Failures

Pakistan and Bangladesh are not outliers in South Asia. They represent variations on a regional pattern with several consistent features: high prevalence of intimate partner violence, significant underreporting driven by stigma and institutional distrust, weak criminal justice outcomes for perpetrators, legislative frameworks that are substantively reasonable but inconsistently enforced, and a tendency for gender violence to accelerate during periods of political instability or social polarization.

India — South Asia's largest country and economy — records rape cases in the tens of thousands annually, with similar conviction challenges. The 2012 Delhi gang rape case generated a wave of legal reform, including the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 2013, but structural impunity persists in most of India's states. In Afghanistan, under Taliban governance since 2021, women's rights have been systematically dismantled. Nepal and Sri Lanka show comparable patterns to Bangladesh — formal legal frameworks, inadequate enforcement, high rates of intimate partner violence that go largely unreported.

UNFPA identifies a common set of enabling factors across the region: patriarchal social norms embedded across generations; legal systems that treat domestic violence as a family matter rather than a criminal one; police cultures that are predominantly male and often reflect rather than counter the social norms driving violence; economic dependency that traps women in abusive relationships; and limited access to legal aid, psychological support, and safe housing for survivors.

What Reform Requires: Law, Enforcement, and Culture

The gap between legislative progress and institutional enforcement is the defining feature of South Asia's gender violence crisis. Pakistan's legal framework is substantively adequate — the problem is not that the laws don't exist, but that the systems meant to enforce them are structurally compromised. This is a challenge that cannot be solved through legislation alone. It requires transformation at the level of police training and culture, prosecutorial capacity, judicial speed, and the economic conditions that determine whether a survivor can pursue a case through a system that will take years and cost money she often does not have.

In Bangladesh, the Women's Affairs Reform Commission — a body established by the interim government — has proposed increasing women's parliamentary representation, strengthening access to justice for survivors, and aligning law enforcement practice with international standards under CEDAW and the UN Security Council's Women, Peace and Security agenda. Human Rights Watch and UN Women have both emphasized that these are not new proposals — they have been reaffirmed by Bangladeshis across successive political eras. The question is institutional will and resource allocation.

The 2021 Minar-e-Pakistan attack was documented in detail. Multiple arrests were made. The perpetrators were not invisible. Yet the institutional response — measured not in arrests but in systemic change — remained incremental. That gap, between visibility and accountability, between documentation and justice, is the challenge South Asia's gender violence crisis ultimately poses. Not the absence of laws, and not the absence of public outrage. The absence of systems that reliably convert both into consequences for perpetrators and safety for survivors.

Pakistan-Bangladesh Relations and the Shared Regional Agenda

Pakistan and Bangladesh normalized diplomatic ties in 2023 after decades of strained relations rooted in 1971. The diplomatic recalibration has opened space for bilateral engagement across trade, regional security, and multilateral forums. Both countries operate within SAARC, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, and both have engaged with UN mechanisms on gender equality.

The shared challenge of gender violence is one area where regional cooperation could be substantive rather than symbolic. Data exchange on trafficking — a significant gender violence dimension that crosses both countries' borders — intelligence sharing on organized crime networks that exploit women, and joint engagement with international bodies on survivor support frameworks would represent meaningful practical collaboration.

More broadly, South Asia's gender violence crisis is not a peripheral human rights issue — it is a development constraint. World Bank and UN Women research consistently links high rates of gender-based violence to reduced female labor force participation, lower educational attainment among girls, higher maternal mortality, and long-term economic costs. For Bangladesh, whose RMG sector depends on millions of female workers, and whose development trajectory has been partly defined by female empowerment gains, the persistence of high intimate partner violence rates represents an unresolved tension at the center of its development model.

The crowd that gathered at Minar-e-Pakistan in August 2021 included men who celebrated Pakistan's founding, and men who attacked a woman in that same space on the same night. The distance between those two groups is not geographically large. It is culturally, institutionally, and structurally enormous. Closing it — in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, across South Asia — is the task that the data, year after year, insists has not yet been completed.