In Pakistan, women face entrenched and multidimensional discrimination, sustained by patriarchal norms, religious fundamentalism, and state complicity. Whether through violence, legal inequality, or social exclusion, women’s rights are systematically undermined, making gender-based oppression one of the most pervasive injustices in the country.
Forced Marriages and Conversions
Girls, particularly from religious minority communities, are frequently subjected to forced marriages and conversions, often to older Muslim men. Authorities routinely dismiss these cases as consensual, ignoring evidence of coercion, age discrepancies, or manipulation. The legal system offers little recourse, especially when blasphemy threats are used to silence families seeking justice.
Intersectionality and Layers of Oppression
Not all women experience persecution in the same way. Women from religious minorities — Christians, Hindus, Ahmadis, Shias — along with poor, rural, disabled, and transgender women, face overlapping layers of discrimination. Marginalized women are more vulnerable to violence, economic exploitation, and exclusion from justice systems, revealing how class, caste, religion, and geography deepen the crisis.
Legal Inequality and State Control
Pakistan’s legal framework enshrines gender inequality in matters such as inheritance, testimony, and family law. In some interpretations of Sharia law, a woman’s testimony carries less legal weight than a man’s, and many women face legal or financial obstacles when seeking divorce, custody, or protection from abuse.
Laws such as the Hudood Ordinances continue to cast a long shadow, especially in how rape and morality are policed. In some cases, survivors have been imprisoned for adultery after reporting sexual violence.
Violence, “Honor” Crimes, and State Complicity
Physical violence against women — domestic abuse, rape, “honor” killings — remains widespread and largely unpunished. Families often use the notion of “honor” to justify murder, with legal loopholes allowing perpetrators to escape justice through familial forgiveness.
State institutions frequently fail victims: police discourage reporting, courts delay trials, and evidence is often mishandled or ignored. In many cases, law enforcement agents themselves perpetrate violence, extort survivors, or shield influential perpetrators.
Policing of Women’s Bodies and Expression
Women’s clothing, movement, behavior, and sexuality are subject to intense public scrutiny and moral policing. Religious extremists and political opportunists alike use women’s bodies as battlegrounds to assert control and define national morality.
Female public figures, journalists, and activists face online abuse, threats, and disinformation campaigns aimed at silencing their voices and discrediting their presence in public life. Many are targeted not only for their ideas, but for simply existing outside traditional gender roles.
Child Marriage and Forced Conversions
Child marriage remains common, especially in rural and conservative areas, robbing girls of education, autonomy, and safety. Girls from religious minorities face an additional threat: forced marriage and conversion to Islam, often sanctioned by local authorities or overlooked by the judicial system.
The state’s reluctance to enforce minimum age laws or protect victims emboldens abusers and sustains cycles of exploitation.
Blasphemy Accusations and Gendered Persecution
Women who resist religious or social norms — whether activists, artists, or everyday citizens — risk false blasphemy accusations. Blasphemy charges are often used to intimidate, silence, or punish women who step outside prescribed roles, turning demands for equality into existential threats under Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws.
Economic and Educational Disempowerment
Millions of women are denied access to education, trapped by poverty, cultural restrictions, or militant threats. Even when educated, women face barriers to employment, lower wages, and workplace harassment. Those who succeed economically often do so at immense personal risk, facing backlash both online and offline.
Healthcare Inequity and Reproductive Violence
Access to healthcare, particularly reproductive and maternal services, remains critically inadequate. Rural and marginalized women suffer the most from high maternal mortality rates, limited prenatal care, and denial of reproductive autonomy. Contraceptive access is restricted by stigma and religious opposition, denying women control over their own bodies and futures.
Digital Surveillance and Online Harassment
The internet, once a refuge, has become another front of persecution. Women who voice dissent online — especially feminist organizers and journalists — face harassment, doxxing, threats of sexual violence, and targeted disinformation campaigns. Cybercrime laws, instead of protecting victims, are often used to silence women critical of the status quo, reinforcing offline oppression in the digital space.
Religious Extremism and the Policing of Women’s Lives
Religious fundamentalist groups use women’s bodies as battlegrounds for ideological control, attacking feminist movements and demonizing women’s rights as “Western conspiracies.” Calls for basic freedoms — education, mobility, dignity — are framed as attacks on religious values, justifying violent backlash and state suppression.