Editorial
Fear should not be the price of stepping outside after dark. Yet for millions of Pakistanis, it is precisely that. A recent Gallup survey conducted across forty-four countries has produced findings that every Pakistani citizen and every Pakistani policymaker should confront without deflection or denial. Globally, forty-five percent of women and twenty-six percent of men reported feeling afraid to walk alone at night. These figures are troubling enough in themselves. But Pakistan’s numbers stand apart from every other country surveyed. Seventy percent of Pakistani women and sixty-nine percent of Pakistani men said they feel fear and insecurity when venturing outside alone after dark. No other country in the survey came close to this level of reported fear across both sexes simultaneously.
The implications are serious. When nearly seven in ten citizens of any country are afraid to move freely in public spaces after nightfall, it represents a fundamental failure of the social contract. The state exists, above all else, to guarantee the safety of those it governs. A government that cannot assure its people that the streets are safe has failed at the most basic level of its responsibilities. But this is not a failure of the state alone. Society shares the burden. Cultural norms that treat public space as hostile, that discourage women from independent movement, and that tolerate crime and harassment as background features of urban life, are not fixed laws of nature. They are conditions that can be changed.
Pakistan must invest seriously in public safety infrastructure, street lighting, law enforcement presence, and legal accountability for crimes against women. But beyond infrastructure, attitudes must shift. Women’s safety is not a women’s issue. It is a national issue. A country where half its population lives in fear is not a country that is functioning as it should.
The Republic Policy book The Bureaucratic Coup is available at vanguard books LHR, ISB and across Pakistan.
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