THERE are disturbing implications behind the staggering numbers, and they speak volumes for the low priority accorded to women’s well-being in Pakistan. According to police data, more than 40,000 women were abducted in Punjab between 2017 and January 2022. That means 8,000 females each year, around 650 each month, go missing. The police claim they have recovered or traced 37,140 of them while the whereabouts of 3,571 remain unknown. However, what appears to be an epidemic of missing women only surfaced in the course of Supreme Court proceedings involving the abduction in 2020 of Sobia Batool, an 18-year-old from Sargodha. When the police leapt into action on the court’s orders, they recovered from various parts of Punjab no less than 151 kidnapped females belonging to Sargodha alone. Of those, 21 were freed from prostitution dens. The police also tracked down 20 bodies of unidentified women in morgues across the province and engaged forensic science services to identify them. The 10 results thus far obtained show that Sobia Batool is not among them — but at least some families will finally get closure.

What was unearthed within the short span of time in which the Punjab Police actually did its job indicates this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Who knows how many women continue to be held against their will, living in misery and humiliation with no hope of rescue? As a report in this paper recently indicated, law-enforcement apathy is much to blame, especially as victims are often from the lower socioeconomic strata. Even if they deign to register an FIR, the police appear reluctant to investigate the abductions and instead tend to dismiss such cases as elopements without even trying to find out whether an elopement is genuine or a pretext for luring a woman into something very sinister. Human trafficking is a very real problem, and women can be trafficked for sex within the country — as the Sargodha police’s endeavours recently uncovered — and abroad. There’s also corruption: it is well known, for instance, that prostitution dens cannot do business without cops being paid off to look the other way. That said, there is also a dearth of resources and training, including sensitisation towards the many forms an ‘abduction’ can take. Given the scale of the issue, it would make sense to have a department within law enforcement, with a preponderance of female cops, dedicated to pursuing cases of missing women.

Published in Dawn, February 28th, 2022