She says her husband tried to kill her. Enter the ‘Pink Wheels’ team

GUJRANWALA, Pakistan – Five female police officers on pink Vespa-style scooters ride through a series of increasingly narrow streets and alleys in the concrete-and-dust city of Gujranwala in Pakistan’s Punjab province. They are part of a pilot program launched in September called “Pink Wheels,” which aims to tackle crimes against women and children by bringing aid directly to their homes.

Here, as in much of Pakistan, police say many women shy away from reporting crimes such as domestic violence or sexual assault. The main barrier? “She would probably encounter a police officer with a moustache,” she says Mohammed Ayyaz SaleemDeputy Inspector General for Gujranwala, who developed the Pink Wheels programme.

He says a woman may be embarrassed to explain her complaint in a culture where men and women live largely separate lives — and the male officer may not understand or dismiss her complaint.

Pakistan (and many other countries around the world) have tried to address these issues with women’s police stations staffed by women. In July, Saleem established a new kind of facility in Gujranwala: a women’s enclave. Decorated with pink and purple benches, it offers women a safe place to informally file complaints before contacting a police station. It offers victims assistance and the search for a lawyer.

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

That’s why the Pink Wheels came into the picture.

A desperate call comes in

One day this fall, that team of five female officers, led by 19-year-old Mahek Muneer, responds to a 911 call from a 34-year-old woman who said her husband had just tried to kill her.

Locals filter out of their homes to watch. Women on scooters are a rarity in Pakistan, let alone women in uniform on pink scooters with assault rifles.

Women smile as they pass by.

But the reception is not always friendly. “Men are trying to show us that the roads are theirs,” said officer Iman Aziz, 23. Sometimes male bystanders say they insult the female officers.

Sometimes, the officers say, men try to run them off the road with their vehicles. Officer Maryam Khalil, 23, recounted an incident in which three young men bumped into her team and “accused us of not knowing how to ride a scooter.”

Another officer, Maryam Sultan, explains that she wears a pandemic-style mask so as not to be recognized by anyone. Her family comes from a very conservative village nearby and is not familiar with the contours of her work.

Still, the women say they enjoy riding the scooter – and that they can help other women report crimes.

I’m looking for the woman who called

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

After learning she had filed a police complaint, she says her husband also locked her and the children out. “We are on the street,” she shouts.

Female neighbors crowd around and tell the officers that the man regularly beats her and their children. Neighborhood men remain silent and keep their distance.

Khalil bangs on the door. When the man opens it, Khalil pulls him out and handcuffs him. He grins and for a while ignores Khalil’s demand that he sit on a nearby rock covering a manhole. “Didn’t you hear me?” Khalil finally asks. “Sit down.”

He’s sitting.

Aziz takes the woman home to record a statement and types the details into an app on her iPad. She explains that this beating started after she went to a dentist to treat her toothache. When she got home, her husband became furious and accused her of having an affair.

The 13-year-old walks in and holds his five-month-old brother in his arms. The couple’s daughters, 12 and 9, are 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 complained to the police because if she left him, she and her children would be destitute. She had begged her father for her help, but he demanded that she remain married because divorce would bring shame to their family. “It would be a black spot on my forehead,” she remembers her father saying.

She tells the officer, Aziz, that she considered suicide but did not want to leave her children to their father. Her twelve-year-old daughter bursts into tears. Her 9-year-old hugs her.

“He didn’t even acknowledge that she was his,” the woman says, referring to her eldest girl, a serious accusation in Pakistan where even rumors of a woman’s infidelity can prompt relatives to kill her to damage the family’s reputation. defend.

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

After the female officers register the complaint via their app, a male officer arrives to arrest him. The smile disappears from his face and his eyes widen in fear. (The female officers are first responders who register complaints. Even in this pilot to enable women to report crimes, male officers make the arrests.)

The woman asks if she would be safe now, if she got justice. “It is our job to register complaints,” says Khalil. “The court will decide.”

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

One of the worst countries in the world for women

The challenges for the police are great.

Despite years of promises from a succession of governments to ensure protection for women, Pakistan fell from being the fourth worst country in the world for women last year to the worst country in the world in 2024, according to an annual ranking of 146 countries by the World Economic Forum. (Taliban-ruled Afghanistan of 2024, where women live significantly worse lives, was not included in the forum.)

The female police officers say the country would do even worse with accurate data. Consider Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province more than 127 million people. In 2023, there were 10,103 reported cases of domestic violence. This year the number is already higher, at 13,295 reports at the end of August.

It is not clear whether this increase is the result of more women reporting crimes to the police, or of more violence.

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

It remains to be seen what impact the Pink Wheels project can have on these numbers – and on the lives of other Pakistani women.

On social media, the officers say they are being mocked as ‘Pinky Force’, something silly and not serious. And when responding to calls, neighbors often come together and talk about how to handle the situation. “When women are beaten, they don’t come forward to help. But they all have advice for us,” says Muneer dryly.

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

Veengas, who goes by her first name only, is a journalist from Karachi. Diaa Hadid contributed reporting from Mumbai, India.

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