Pakistan: Violence against Women and ICT

Violence against women is rife in Pakistan, in rural and urban settings within all classes, castes and religious groups. However governmental stakeholders and the women’s movement have both tended to focus more on violence justified by Islam and customary practices, ignoring more common systems of violence.

When a violent incident occurs, women have very few places they can seek out help. Oftentimes, women look to the members of their family, but when the violence originates from the family, there is no real help available. The only option is to leave the family and social structure entirely which, in a society where the family reigns supreme and kinship networks mean basic survival, is not a viable option. Government and private shelters are available for crisis intervention, but they assume that in a situation of violence, a woman will want to run away from her family. Furthermore, government-created emergency services only function in the cities and even these are not trained in gender sensitivity. In fact, law enforcement officers are notoriously insensitive and are often perpetrators of violence themselves.

Many types of violence are invisibilised by the various discourses vying for attention in Pakistan. The kind of violence that gets media, NGO, government and international organisations’ consideration are those that are associated with religion, custom, tribal societies or a combination of all these. Domestic violence recieves very little notice and is assumed even by women as a normal part of married life. Sexual harassment in the workplace or in public places is invisibilised as well. Even honour killing and jirga1-enacted rape, violence that is already visible, gain the spotlight only on the basis of their religious or customary aspects, rather than analysing them for this larger truth: in all sectors of Pakistan, men and women feel that men have the ability and the right to carry out almost any kind of violence upon women, and that women must and do accept it as the natural order of things. It is the same principle that is at play during jirga-enacted rape in a village or date rape in a city.

Finally, there is no national awareness campaign, whether publicly or privately funded, to spread knowledge and advocate against violence against womenⁱ. Women do not know their rights and are not educated to believe that they do not deserve the violence that they experience, or that they have an option to resist it.

Access to mobile technology is increasing rapidly in Pakistan, and women are also gaining access, albeit at a slower rate than men. Mobile technology is the most ripe for use in strategies of empowermentⁱ, as long as access to technology is accompanied by training and orientation to the device, and enticement to its many possibilities. This, in concert with online campaigns to raise awareness and agitate for greater stateⁱ action will help reduce the cases of violence against women in Pakistan.