Alarming Rise in Gender-Based Violence in Pakistan: Over 237,000 Cases Reported from 2021 to 2025
A recent report reveals over 237,000 gender-based violence cases against women and girls in Pakistan between 2021 and 2025, highlighting a growing crisis.
Islamabad, October 15 (Daily Kiran) : A human rights organization based in Islamabad has reported a staggering 237,216 crimes against women and girls in Pakistan from 2021 to 2025. The Peace and Justice Network (PJN) unveiled these findings in its national gender-based violence (GBV) report, part of the National Justice Development Data initiative.
According to the Pakistan Observer, understanding the true scale of gender-based violence across the country requires analyzing both provincial data and hidden information. The report highlights that Punjab alone accounts for 82.5 percent (195,787 cases) of all reported GBV incidents, despite housing only 51.5 percent of the national population.
Moreover, the report indicates that over 90 percent of cases involving gang rape, sexual violence in custody, and incest are recorded in Punjab. In contrast, Sindh reported 25,107 GBV cases, making up 10.6 percent of the national total. Kidnapping was the most common gender-based crime in Sindh, with 19,289 incidents, which constitutes approximately 77 percent of the province’s total cases.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), representing 16.5 percent of Pakistan’s population, recorded only 10,210 cases, a mere 4.3 percent of the national total. The low number of reported cases masks a grim reality; among the 2,334 domestic violence incidents logged by police, 1,197 resulted in murder.
Additionally, Baluchistan reported 3,108 cases, while Pakistan-administered Kashmir (POK) and Gilgit-Baltistan (POGB) reported 1,572 and 161 cases, respectively. These figures reflect significant institutional and geographical barriers to reporting violence.
In POGB, only seven rape cases were documented in five years, indicating not a lack of violence but rather severe underreporting due to close-knit communal structures and geographic isolation. In POK, the statistics skew heavily towards kidnapping cases; out of 1,572 reported incidents, 1,474 fall into this category, while domestic physical violence remains largely invisible in police records.
