Safety is a right

The rising tide of harassment and assault against girls and women in Pakistan’s universities, workplaces and public spaces is not a series of isolated tragedies. It reflects a system that continues to fail half its citizens.

In today’s Pakistan, stepping outside one’s home has become an act of courage. Viral videos of men harassing young girls and women on streets and marketplaces flood social media, mainly as fodder for outrage and entertainment. The police are tagged, statements are issued and then silence returns until another girl or woman is hurt or humiliated. The spectacle repeats; accountability does not.

The deeper decay lies within our institutions. Universities, which should be sanctuaries of learning and safety, often shield perpetrators under the pretext of ‘procedure’. Inquiry committees are hastily formed, not to deliver justice but to manage optics and contain controversy. Survivors are discredited or disciplined, and in some cases, expelled as if their courage to speak up were the real crime.

The accused, meanwhile, continue their duties unscathed. Similar patterns persist in corporate settings, where zero-tolerance policies coexist with quiet reinstatements. This institutional hypocrisy is how impunity becomes policy.

Yet, against all odds, girls and women continue to resist. They protest, mobilise online and demand transparency in procedures long designed to suppress their voices. Their courage has forced administrations to confront uncomfortable truths about their own complicity. But every act of defiance comes at a heavy emotional cost: exhaustion, public scrutiny, and reputational risk. In Pakistan, justice for women still depends not on systems but on how loud the outrage becomes.

The state’s absence is glaring. Why must women rely on hashtags, activists or social media pressure to access justice? The constitution guarantees every citizen the right to life, dignity, education and mobility. Yet for women, these rights remain conditional – filtered through patriarchal authority and bureaucratic apathy. This is a reflection of the collective failure to enforce equality. Pakistan continues to be governed ‘by men, for men’, with women tokenised as figureheads in spaces where real decisions are made elsewhere.

With 51 per cent of girls out of school at the secondary level, compared to 39 per cent of boys, women’s exclusion begins long before they enter the workforce. Only 24 per cent of women participate in the labour market, and a mere five per cent hold senior management roles in corporations. The familiar excuse that ‘there are not enough qualified women’ conceals the truth: women are not absent from leadership but are being pushed out of unsafe, unequal, and unresponsive systems.

The cost of this failure is immense. Pakistan ranks 145th out of 146 countries on the Global Gender Gap Index 2024, with a Gender Development Index of 0.83 among the lowest globally. Yet despite these alarming statistics, little has been done to dismantle gender biases in access to education, employment and leadership. Most official measures remain confined to symbolic programmes and promises rather than systemic change.

Safety cannot rely on chance and empowerment cannot be symbolic. Pakistan needs a zero-tolerance culture enforced from the top in universities, ministries and corporations alike. Leaders must ensure transparent investigations, penalise retaliation and hold institutions accountable for negligence. Protecting perpetrators in the name of reputation is complicity, not leadership.

In Pakistan, decision-making remains male-centred; public transport ignores women’s mobility; and universities and workplaces still marginalise women’s voices. Inclusion is about sharing power once women enter. Until women can move, study and work without fear and until inquiry committees begin to deliver justice rather than delay it. Safety in Pakistan will remain what it should never have been: a privilege, not a right.

The writer is a professor of economics and director at the Centre for Business and Economic Research, IBA. She can be reached at: lnaz@iba.edu.pk