The woman found raped and murdered in Karachi’s Clifton last week was not the first and will not be the last. Her body, discovered in an upscale neighbourhood built on claims of safety, is only the latest entry in a ledger that has grown far beyond individual crimes. Pakistan now lives with levels of sexual violence that no longer shock. Anyone paying attention saw this coming.
Ours is a country where girls are assaulted in mosques, patients are violated in hospitals, and infants are raped by men who later insist they felt tempted. The pattern is too extensive to be blamed on failure in one city. It is a national emergency. Police data tells its own story, where thousands of rape cases are registered every year, and most never reach a courtroom. Those who do often collapse for reasons that have nothing to do with guilt or innocence.
The state’s response, in the meantime, moves between promise and paralysis. Anti-rape crisis cells have been designed to offer survivors one-stop assistance, and recent reviews note real gains in forensic access and medico-legal services. There has been a shift in public tone since the motorway gang rape of 2020; at minimum, authorities now avoid blaming victims outright. There is progress. It is thin. It was only yesterday that these pages deplored how a judge sitting in the highest echelon of powers saw fit to describe the Noor Mukadam murder as the outcome of a “vice” associated with a “living relationship.”
The Clifton case has entered the same channel, and therefore, its outcome will depend less on the statutes on paper and more on whether the system is willing to enforce them. There’s enough in the chequered past to show how even when police file an FIR, the case is handed to an overburdened prosecutor who is often unable to move it in a courtroom that will likely postpone hearings. A conviction in one forum is undermined by procedural delays in another. One weak link breaks the chain.
There is also the older problem of politics. A former prime minister defended sexual violence by saying, “men are not robots.” These remarks still circulate in private conversations, shaping attitudes inside police stations and homes. This is why public sympathy drains away once a case becomes uncomfortable. It is easier to question the woman than recognise that predators operate everywhere–homes, clinics, seminaries, parks, morgues. The legal landscape has shifted in some ways. A Supreme Court ruling that recognised psychological abuse as cruelty expands how harm is understood. It matters. Yet this progress sits next to the fact that gender-based violence is rarely treated as a crime in Pakistan’s collective mindset. Courts continue to assume consent within marriage as a given, even when bruises tell another story.
We have before ourselves a much harder question about the kind of country we are willing to tolerate. A state that cannot provide safety in homes, hospitals or mosques cannot pretend that the problem lies at the margins. Each new case shows how much has been normalised. The cycle repeats because it is easier than facing the scale of what has taken root. *