A total of 237,216 crimes against women and girls were officially recorded across Pakistan between 2021 and 2025, according to the National Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Crime Report 2021–2025 released by the Peace and Justice Network (PJN) Pakistan, an Islamabad-based human rights organisation. The findings, compiled under the group's National Data for Justice Development (D4JD) Initiative, present what rights groups are calling a deeply alarming portrait of systemic violence against women — and of the institutional failures that allow it to persist.

Provincial Breakdown: Punjab's Outsized Share

Punjab accounted for a staggering 82.5 per cent of all police-reported gender-based violence crimes nationally, registering 195,787 cases — disproportionate even relative to its 51.5 per cent share of Pakistan's population. The province also recorded more than 90 per cent of all nationally registered cases of gang rape, custodial sexual violence, and incest, according to the report.

Sindh followed with 25,107 GBV cases, representing 10.6 per cent of the national total. Kidnapping and abduction dominated Sindh's gender crime profile, accounting for 19,289 cases — roughly 77 per cent of the province's reported total.

Hidden Violence: KP, Balochistan, and Occupied Territories

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), home to 16.5 per cent of Pakistan's population, reported only 10,210 cases — just 4.3 per cent of the national figure. But raw numbers obscure a grim reality: of 2,334 domestic violence cases reported to police in KP, 1,197 resulted in murder, the report found.

Balochistan recorded 3,108 cases, while Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) logged 1,572 cases and Pakistan-occupied Gilgit-Baltistan (PoGB) just 161 cases. Rights researchers note that these figures likely reflect severe underreporting driven by institutional barriers, geographic isolation, and tightly knit communal structures — rather than a lower incidence of violence. In PoGB, only seven rape cases were registered over the entire five-year period. In PoK, 1,474 of 1,572 total cases involved kidnapping and abduction, while domestic physical violence remained largely invisible in police records.

What Rights Groups Are Saying

The Voice of Pakistan Minority (VOPM) responded to the findings with a sharp indictment of state structures. 'These are not isolated tragedies. They reveal a society in which violence follows women from their homes into public life and then into a justice system too slow, too weak, and too indifferent to protect them. A woman should not need to be murdered before the state recognises that she was in danger,' the group said.

The organisation further argued that Pakistan's crisis goes beyond public safety: 'It has a governance failure, a policing failure, and a moral failure. Every unreported case is a woman the state failed to reach. Every delayed investigation is a perpetrator it failed to deter. And every woman who fears going to the police is proof that Pakistan's promise of equal citizenship remains unfinished.'

What the Data Obscures — and Why It Matters

The PJN report explicitly acknowledges the limitations of police-reported data, noting that official figures capture only what reaches formal law enforcement — a fraction of actual incidents in a country where social stigma, fear of reprisal, and institutional indifference deter reporting. This is the first comprehensive five-year GBV dataset compiled under the D4JD Initiative, and advocates argue it should be a baseline for urgent legislative and policing reform rather than a closed chapter.

With Pakistan's overall governance under sustained scrutiny from international rights bodies, the release of this report is expected to intensify pressure on provincial administrations — particularly Punjab — to overhaul both their prevention frameworks and survivor support systems.