The public apology issued to actress Saba Qamar by a journalist after making unfounded claims about her personal life has been widely treated as closure. It should instead prompt a harder institutional reckoning. The ease with which a reputational attack was launched, and the minimal cost attached to its retraction, reveal a regulatory gap that apologies alone cannot fill.
A slander cycle in Pakistan now follows a predictable route. Someone with a microphone hints at socially unacceptable conduct, and the allegation spreads like wildfire because it fits a pre-existing suspicion: ambitious women must have an explanation that is not merit. The apology arrives late without any consequences, and the woman is left to do the heaviest labour of restoring an identity that was never actually in dispute. This is where law is meant to matter. Pakistan has a civil defamation framework under the Defamation Ordinance, 2002, and criminal defamation provisions in the Penal Code. Remedies do exist in the form of damages, retraction, injunctions, and the deterrent effect of litigation, but in practice, most women do not litigate because the process itself becomes another theatre of exposure.
Things have become spectacularly worse, thanks to the digital arena. The Digital Rights Foundation’s cyber-harassment helpline recorded 2,473 new complaints in 2023 and reported that women remained the largest group. They map a daily environment in which defamation and harassment are routine costs of speaking, working (some may say, even existing) online. The state’s response has leaned toward expanding coercive powers rather than building credible redress mechanisms for victims.
Earlier in 2022, the Islamabad High Court warned against criminalising defamation in a manner that chills speech, particularly criticism of institutions. That caution was correct. Yet the public often hears only one part of the debate: free speech versus regulation. Women live in the missing part, where speech is weaponised against them, and the enforcement apparatus is either indifferent or selectively mobilised.
Regulatory bodies have remained largely absent. Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority codes emphasise accuracy and harm avoidance, but enforcement is sporadic and reactive. Press bodies seldom pursue complaints unless public pressure mounts, and even then, outcomes tend to be advisory rather than corrective.
When singer Meesha Shafi pursued defamation-related remedies involving a UK broadcaster, the outcome included formal on-air corrections and public apologies embedded within a regulatory framework. Contrarily, in Pakistan, newsrooms and platforms treat these corrections as PR moves, not professional obligations. Pakistan’s media bodies, courts, and regulators need to stop treating misogynistic slander as a personal spat and start treating it as a governance failure, one that corrodes credibility and rewards the worst instincts of the attention economy.
