ast month, the new Punjab government declared a ‘rape emergency’ to tackle rising cases of sexual violence against women and children in the province. Among the measures the Punjab government announced was a review of all rape cases in the province by the Cabinet Committee on Rape and Law and Order, a consultation with experts, activists and lawyers, and urged parents and teachers to supervise youngsters and not leave them alone at home.

While the government is rightly trying to take sexual violence seriously, this is an approach that has already been tried, with limited results at best. A language of ‘emergency’ implies that the ‘emergency’ will end, the issue will be addressed, and life will return to normal. However, sexual violence is a complex social problem with varied factors influencing it. We may hope to reduce it, but it is a problem with no clean end. There is no ‘normal’ to return to, and there are no quick-fix solutions.

At the press conference where the Punjab government announced this emergency, provincial ministers mentioned some examples of simplistic solutions that in fact do not work. Home Minister Atta Tarrar suggested that parents and teachers closely supervise children and not leave them alone at home. This logic of constant surveillance and supervision rests on the assumption that perpetrators of sexual violence are always strangers whereas sexual violence against children is frequently committed by persons they know and trust, who are then able to shame and scare the children and adolescents into silence. A lifetime of confusion and shame follows. Even when it comes to adults, many cases of rape are not reported for fear of shame, or of not being believed because the perpetrator is a respected community elder, a coworker, colleague or a close relation. Overall, sexual violence by strangers occurs far less frequently than that by persons known to the victim.

This logic of surveillance, translated to the policy level, has even more bizarre consequences. Lahore’s much-touted Safe Cities Projects set up cameras on public thoroughfares for the purpose of deterring crime and easing identification of perpetrators. The project cost Rs 14 billion when it was set up in 2017, and had a running cost of Rs 600 million every quarter in 2020. Despite this, about a quarter of the cameras are not working. They were notably not working at the site of the Anarkali Bazaar blast in January 2022 and the blast near Arfa Karim Tower in 2017. As recently as last month, a Lahori whose car was stolen five years ago was still receiving tickets for the vehicle, meaning that Safe City cameras were tracking the car, but police have so far been unable to help, despite a court order.

Instead, the project is a privacy hazard for Lahore’s citizens. In 2019, videos and pictures of people riding their cars on Lahore’s roads, taken by Safe City road cameras were leaked online, showing how delicate the façade of safety offered by surveillance infrastructure is. This surveillance falls heavier on transgender persons and those of working class or minority ethnic backgrounds because of how the state views them as suspicious and prone to criminal behaviour. Precious money and resources that could have been allocated to education, housing, healthcare (including medico-legal support), shelters and community building are thus used for surveillance infrastructure that hurts the most vulnerable. A hysteria around sexual violence thus has the potential to hurt victims instead of supporting them.

An ‘emergency’ suggests that solutions to the problem are easy to find and implement. Our recent experience with trying to tackle sexual violence shows otherwise. Consider the recent Anti-Rape (Investigation & Trial), Act 2021 passed in the aftermath of the motorway rape case. Much like the Punjab government’s current effort, the law’s stated purpose is: “to ensure expeditious redress of rape and sexual abuse crimes in respect of women and children through special investigation teams and special courts providing for efficacious procedures, speedy trial, evidence and matters connected therewith.”

For one thing, the law does not extend protection of special courts and the like to transgender persons, who are among the most vulnerable for sexual crimes. Secondly, many of the steps needed to operationalise the law, such as anti-rape crisis cells in hospitals or formulation of crucial rules under it, have not been taken to date, delayed in part due to the change of government.

Mostly interestingly, a report filed by the Punjab Police before the Lahore High Court in August 2021 stated that the police required Rs 4.9 billion initially and Rs 2.58 billion annually in recurring costs to set up the special investigation units required by the law. Separate investigation units for sexual crimes are needed in Pakistan and have been running on a limited scale in Lahore district since 2017.

However, ambitious laws promising grand schemes with little integration with existing institutions are unlikely to work. Laws hastily passed for face saving, with little homework, and with scant attention paid to implementation after a law has been passed, headlines made and twitter trends generated will not deter sexual crimes.

Another law that has been a victim of a similar approach is the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act, 2016. The law aimed to set up a protection system to rescue and house women who find themselves facing domestic violence. However, to date, it has only been notified for the district of Multan, where the robust district protection mechanism has been ignored, and all focus seems to be on the Violence Against Women Centre. Rules required to make the law functional are absent. A lack of training of the judiciary means that the court orders required to ensure women’s monetary, residential and physical wellbeing are hard to obtain. It seems that a law was hastily introduced and subsequently ignored.

In fact, more holistic and effective measures to address sexual violence require precisely the opposite: long-term, consistent efforts to train law enforcement, judges, medico-legal officers and prosecutors, and changing the cultural and social conversation around gender roles.

The Anti-Rape Act, 2021’s requirement of trained police officers for investigation, and the continuation of the Lahore High Court’s 2017 measures for separate courts with trained judges for rape trails is commendable. However, these measures still put the onus on victims to report a crime and see it through to trial. A preventive approach would instead require inculcating in society a thinking against stereotypical gender roles that rest on ideas of female modesty, subservient roles for women and crucially for children: shame and silence around sexuality. In this regard, the Punjab government’s announcement of awareness campaigns against sexual harassment in schools is commendable. While changing social attitudes is a very long effort, it is the most promising measure.

New laws, speedy trial measures and harsher punishments are short-term measures, akin to putting band-aid on a cancerous wound. Such approaches relying on brute force of the law can hurt more than protect – the criminal justice system after all targets minority ethnicities and working class people more frequently. Justice for sexual violence need not always look like men in uniforms, guns, CCTV cameras, intimidating courtrooms and people being hauled to prison for lengthy sentences. The language of ‘rape emergency’ posits ambitious laws, speedy trials and exceptional measures as a solution to the complex social problem of rape. We must look beyond laws alone to rescue us.

The writer teaches law at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, LUMS.