It begins, as it too often does, with the everyday turned sinister. In Lahore, a young woman was dragged into a nightmare of attempted abduction on a public road. The assailant might have melted away into the anonymity of countless others, had a camera not caught the moment. Elsewhere, on the Lasani Express, an ordinary train journey collapsed into chaos when a family was set upon by predatory men, turning harassment into violence the moment their advances were resisted.
Both women were “saved” not by systemic protection but by chance; the eye of a CCTV camera, the clamour of public pressure and the fleeting presence of witnesses. Heartwrenchingly, this is what passes for safety in Pakistan. And it is why so many ask, bitterly, why bother reporting at all?
Because herein lies the deeper malaise, as our institutions appear calibrated to operate as silent spectators. It is as if the moral compass of the state must first be rebooted by a trending video before the machinery of justice can creak into motion. Until then, women and children are expected to endure, to avoid, to pray that harm will not find them.
Consider the despair this sends to every girl who steps onto a bus or train or to every woman who dares to walk home late alone. In a society where over 80 per cent of women report experiencing harassment in public places and 82 per cent at bus stops in Punjab, the tragic truth is that if your case fails to go viral, the odds of action are slim indeed.
This corrosive uncertainty seeps into every space, be it the factory floor, the classroom, the newsroom, or the boardroom. We need only recall how a senior corporate executive was recently found guilty of harassment by the Sindh Ombudsman and ordered removed. Yet, cushioned by an all-male board, he still sits in his chair, still signs papers and still wields power over those he was proven to have abused. What lesson is left for the young women in his company except that men at the top can outwait even a formal verdict?
So, again, why bother? Why risk speaking when silence is safer? The truth is that women “bother” because they must. For their own dignity, for their own survival and for the generations that will walk the same streets, ride the same trains, or step into the same offices.
The work before us is no longer about celebrating the occasional arrest. It is to build institutions that do not need to be shamed into delivering justice. It is to demand corporate boards where women sit as equals, police forces that treat harassment as a crime, and a public transport systemically engineered for safety.
Until then, every headline of “justice served” is really a question in disguise: why must women still be grateful for surviving what the state had a duty to prevent?
