The Federal Shariat Court restored Section 325 of the Pakistan Penal Code on May 18, 2026. No protests, no emergency session, no coalition demanding reversal. A law that criminalises surviving a suicide attempt came back with less noise than a routine budget notification. That quietness tells you everything about whose lives this country considers worth protecting.
Colonial Origins and Selective Justice
Section 325 was never Islamic in origin. It was lifted from British colonial legislation in 1860, inherited at Partition, and never examined because the people it harms have never been a constituency worth fighting for – those in psychiatric crisis, women with nowhere to go, transgender persons surviving without documents or shelter, men undone by debt.
The court said decriminalisation was against the Quran and Sunnah. Classical Islamic jurisprudence says otherwise: legal responsibility requires sound intellect, severe mental illness suspends accountability, and preservation of life is a foundational obligation of the law. None of that was apparently the point.
The law does not fall on everyone the same way. Women facing domestic violence and/or workplace harassment and torture, transgender people with no institutional safety net, men without social capital or legal recourse – all meet this law at their most exposed. For a woman already running from her home, surviving now carries a criminal charge. That is not protection. That is the state deciding her crisis is her fault.
Femicide: Managed, Not Solved
Femicide appears on Instagram, in television segments that run the story for two days and move on, in donor reports that circulate at hotel conferences and then get filed. What it almost never appears in is a parliamentary debate where someone actually has to answer for the numbers, or a meeting of lawyers and judges asking why conviction rates are so low that most perpetrators walk free, or a civil society campaign that does not shut down the moment the donor money runs out.
Femicide in Pakistan is not hidden. It is managed. Women and girls are disproportionately its victims. The attention spikes when a case is upsetting enough to hold an audience and evaporates when it is not. The institutional response in between is silence – the kind that gets called normalcy.
Filicide: The Invisible Crisis
This is where the failure is most complete and most invisible because we have not even built the language for it. A parent kills a child. Our vocabulary gives us qatl, gives us saffak in a headline, gives us a moral verdict applied almost exclusively to mothers, and stops there. The word filicide, as used in psychiatry and law, demands a different set of questions: what broke down, and when, and who was supposed to notice and did not?
Pakistan has no postpartum mental health screening system. The Thinking Healthy Programme – developed and clinically tested here, endorsed by the World Health Organization as part of its global mental health programme, proven to achieve remission in three out of four women with perinatal depression – is not systematically implemented in the country that produced it.
Women in postpartum psychosis, women ground down by domestic violence and economic dependence, women with no shelter bed and no helpline that answers – they become the headline. Saffak. The headline does not ask what came before. Neither does the planning commission. Neither does the funded project that will close regardless of what the data is still showing. We built a programme the world adopted and did not use it ourselves. That is not an oversight. That is a decision about whose suffering counts.
Thirty Years of Watching the Same Pattern
I have worked on these three issues for over thirty years. Most of that work has been done outside funded projects, outside donor priority lists, outside the rooms where decisions get made. I am not saying this for sympathy. I am saying it because the pattern matters.
All three crises share the same mechanism of neglect. Attention arrives when there is a project behind it. The project has a three-to-five year life. When it ends, data collection stops, coalitions disperse, recommendations sit in reports no ministry requested. The problem continues on its own schedule.
What Needs to Happen
Here is what needs to happen, and none of it requires a new idea.
- Lawmakers need to stand on the floor of the National Assembly and name femicide as a legislative emergency – not in a press release, on the floor, with conviction data demanded from the relevant ministries.
- Benches and Bars need to publicly examine why perpetrators of gender-based violence routinely avoid punishment.
- Section 325 needs to be repealed and replaced with mandatory psychiatric evaluation and care for anyone who survives a crisis, regardless of gender.
- Postpartum mental health screening needs to be mandated through the lady health worker network that already reaches rural communities.
- A national database on femicide, filicide and suicide – disaggregated by sex, gender identity, relationship to the perpetrator and province – must exist, be publicly accessible, and be updated annually.
These are not proposals. They are the minimum. The question is not whether anyone in a position of power knows they are needed. The question is whether anyone in that position will act when there is no grant cycle, no donor delegation, no conference deadline making it temporarily convenient to care.
