After the infamous F-9 gangrape that sparked massive outrage over the country’s rape epidemic just a few weeks ago, another woman was gang-raped at gunpoint in the nation’s capital yesterday. The woman in question was raped in F-11 by two men who promised to help her find a job. Despite authorities strengthening rape laws in 2016, conviction rates in rape cases remain abysmally low. 12 days after the F-9 rape, it was revealed that the suspects were killed in a police encounter while being interrogated. It is safe to assume that the official police report omitted a few crucial details, specifically the circumstances surrounding their death. In Pakistan, extrajudicial killings have become the norm. Instead of litigating sexual assault cases within the confines of a legal framework, law enforcement chooses to kill the accused on the spot. Without reforms to ensure that the country’s justice delivery systems can function effectively, we risk compromising our efforts towards eliminating sexual violence. Indeed, it is the court’s responsibility to set a strong legal precedent that deters people from committing rape. Victims of sexual assault, the majority of whom are women and children, simply don’t feel empowered enough to seek legal recourse. Those who muster the courage to do so are met with the secondary trauma of a trial and bombarded with a barrage of retaliatory threats from their perpetrators, often influential people who are able to evade justice. Despite rape’s classification as a non-compoundable offence, victims are often coerced into making underhanded settlements with their perpetrators or withdrawing their charges altogether. It certainly doesn’t help that courts remain reluctant to hand down rape convictions in cases where there are no physical marks of violence on the victim’s body and the evidence consists solely of the victim’s own testimony. Judges ascribe undue significance to bodily evidence by the defendant and physical, as opposed to verbal resistance by the victim. These biases continue to pervade all facets of the Pakistani criminal justice system. From the initial lodging of complaints to the final resolution of cases, women seeking legal recourse for sexual violence are met with indifferent law enforcement officials who claim that the occurrence of these crimes is precluded within Pakistani social norms. *