She says her husband tried to kill her. Join the “Pink Circles” team.

GUJRANWALA, Pakistan – Five policewomen on pink Vespa-style scooters drive through a series of increasingly narrowing streets and alleys in the concrete and dusty city of Gujranwala in Pakistan’s Punjab province. They are part of a pilot program called “Pink Circles” launched in September, which aims to prevent crimes against women and children by bringing help directly to their homes.

Police say that here, as in much of Pakistan, many women are afraid to report crimes such as domestic violence or sexual assault. The main barrier? “She would probably meet a cop with a mustache,” he says Muhammad Ayyaz SaliemDeputy Inspector General, Gujranwala, who developed the Pink Wheels program.

She says a woman may be embarrassed to explain her complaint in a culture where men and women are largely segregated, and an officer may not understand her complaint or dismiss it.

Pakistan (and many other countries around the world) have tried to solve these problems by employing women in police stations. In July, Saleem established a new kind of facility in Gujranwala: the Women’s Enclave. Decorated with pink and purple couches, it provides women with a safe space to informally file complaints before contacting the police station, and also helps victims obtain advice and a lawyer.

But Saleem began to worry that the Women’s Enclave was not serving women in rural areas and was unable to leave their homes.

That’s why Pink Wheels came into the picture.

Desperate calls come in

One day this fall, a team of five officers, led by 19-year-old Mahek Muneer, respond to an emergency call from a 34-year-old woman who claims that her husband has just tried to kill her.

Locals come out of their homes to watch it. Women riding scooters are rare in Pakistan, let alone women in uniforms riding pink scooters and armed with assault rifles.

Women smile as they pass by.

But the reception is not always so friendly. “The men are trying to show us that the roads belong to them,” says 23-year-old officer Iman Aziz. He says that sometimes passersby throw insults at the officers.

Sometimes, officers say, the men try to drive them off the roads in their vehicles. Officer Maryam Khalil (23) recounted an incident in which three young men drove into her unit and “accused us of not knowing how to ride a scooter.”

Another officer, Maryam Sultan, explains that she wears a pandemic-style mask so that no one recognizes her. Her family comes from a nearby deeply conservative village and is unfamiliar with the contours of her work.

Still, the women say they love riding scooters and helping other women report crimes.

Finding the woman who called

Today’s biggest challenge is locating a woman in distress. But then they meet a slim 13-year-old boy who points them in the right direction. It turns out to be her son, and she soon rushes to meet the officers, sobbing and showing them the bruises on her face and neck. She says her husband tried to strangle her.

After being told she had filed a police complaint, she said her husband had also locked her and the children out of the house. “We are on the street,” he shouts.

Neighbors are crowding the area and tell the officers that her husband regularly beats her and their children. Residents of the area are silent and keep their distance.

Khalil bangs on the door. When the husband opens it, Khalil pulls him out and handcuffs him. He smirks and ignores for a moment Khalil’s demand to sit on the nearby slab of stone covering the hatch. “Didn’t you hear me?” Khalil finally asks. “Sit down.”

He’s sitting.

Aziz takes the woman home to give her testimony and types it into an app on her iPad. She explains that the beatings started after she went to the dentist to treat a toothache. When she returned home, her husband became furious, accusing her of having an affair.

A 13-year-old enters, holding his five-month-old brother in his arms. The couple’s daughters, 12 and 9, stand close to her. “My daughter begged him not to kill me. She saved me,” says the woman.

She tells the officers that her husband abused her for years, but she never filed a complaint with the police because if she left him, she and her children would be destitute. She begged her father for help, but he demanded that she remain married because divorce would bring shame to their family. “It would be a black mark on my forehead,” he recalls his father saying.

She tells Officer Aziz that she considered suicide but did not want to leave the children to their father. Her 12-year-old daughter burst into tears. A 9-year-old hugs her.

“He didn’t even admit she was his,” the woman says, referring to her eldest daughter, a serious allegation in Pakistan, where even rumors of a woman’s infidelity can prompt relatives to kill her to protect the family’s reputation.

“Is it true?” Muneer asks the girl. She nods. “He always said I was born to ten different men.” Nearby, her father smiles.

Once the officers register a complaint through the app, an officer arrives to arrest him. The smile disappears from his face and his eyes widen with fear. (Officers act as first responders who record complaints. Even in this pilot, which aims to empower women to report crimes, arrests are made by male officers.)

The woman asks if she will be safe now and if she will get justice. “Our job is to register complaints,” Khalil says. “The court will decide.”

But without reforms that ensure men can be reliably convicted of crimes against their wives and children, the initiative will fail, says Sidra Shehbaz, 38, a social activist in Gujranwala. “If victims don’t get justice, they will lose faith, just as they have already lost trust in male police,” she says.

One of the worst countries in the world for women

The challenges facing the police are enormous.

Despite decades of promises by successive governments to protect women, Pakistan has fallen in ranking from the fourth worst country in the world for women last year to the worst in the world in 2024, according to an annual ranking of 146 countries by World Economic Forum. (The forum did not include Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in 2024, where women’s lives are much worse).

Police officers say that if the data were accurate, it would be even worse for the country. Consider Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province over 127 million people. In 2023, 10,103 cases of domestic violence were reported. This year the number is higher and by the end of August it amounted to 13,295 applications.

It is unclear whether this increase reflects more women reporting to police or more incidents of violence.

However, there are signs that various efforts in Gujranwala to encourage women to report crimes are working. The city’s population is about 6 million peoplewhich constitutes less than 5% of the voivodeship, but they report 10% of all cases of domestic violence.

Time will tell what impact the Pink Wheels project can have on these numbers – and on the lives of other Pakistani women.

On social media, officers claim that they are ridiculed and called the “Pinky Force”, something stupid and frivolous. And when they respond to calls, neighbors often gather together and tell them how to handle the situation. “When women are beaten, they don’t come forward to help. But they all have advice for us,” Muneer says dryly.

Her colleague, Officer Sultan, laughs. “Of course people think women don’t know how to cope,” she says. “But we know what to do.”

Veengas, who goes only by her first name, is a journalist based in Karachi. Diaa Hadid reported from Mumbai, India.

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