Islamabad, Oct 18 (IANS) Convictions in rape-related offences remain low in Pakistan even after five years of enactment of a law promising to change the manner in which such cases were investigated and tried in the country, with specialised courts expected to give judgment within four months, according to a report.

"Between 2021 and mid-2026, the four provinces registered 47,452 cases across five categories of rape-related offences, yet convictions remain few, thousands of cases have been cancelled or left unresolved, and the government’s own records reveal significant gaps in accountability," Riazul Haq, an investigative journalist, said in the report in Pakistani daily Dawn.

"From Punjab’s extraordinarily high number of registered gang-rape cases to the prolonged trials in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), the data exposes a criminal justice system in which registering a crime is only the beginning of a long and uncertain journey towards justice," it added.

Pakistan’s Anti-Rape (Investigation and Trial) Act, 2021 was implemented to create specialised courts, crisis centres, trained investigators and speedy justice. Even after five years, the government has been struggling with the basics of the system, thus causing trials to drag out for years.

Punjab province accounted for 89.7 per cent of all registered rape cases in Pakistan from 2021 to mid-2026. Gang-rape accounted for 62.8 per cent of the total rape-related data in Pakistan, and 99.2 per cent of all such registered cases were in the province, according to the Dawn report.

Gang-rape cases in Punjab account for 69.4 per cent of the total number of cases, and its 29,555 registered cases are 6.6 times its 4,494 cases of single-perpetrator rape. Sindh reported 4.3 single-perpetrator rapes for every gang-rape, while Khyber Pakhtunkhwa recorded 51 and 47, respectively.

From 2021 to mid-2026, Punjab reported 214 custodial rape cases, making up 99.5 per cent of all custodial rape cases in the national dataset.

The number of registered child-rape cases in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa jumped from 270 in 2021 to 423 in 2025. It also recorded 7.4 times as many child-rape cases as Sindh. According to the data, the last child-rape conviction in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was in 2021, while there were nine such convictions.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa reported 1,637 child-rape cases and secured zero convictions from 2022 to May 2026, with eight recorded acquittals. During the same period, it reported 38 cases of rape-and-murder. Among these cases, 37 are in court, and there have been no convictions or acquittals.

Sindh accounted for 3.2 per cent of all registered rape cases in Pakistan, according to the data from 2021-2026. Single-perpetrator rape cases make up 64.9 per cent of Sindh’s 1,510 cases, and gang-rape accounts for 15 per cent.

Balochistan recorded 117 cases of rape across all categories from 2021 to mid-2026. Among the total cases, registered single-perpetrator rape cases are 94, while there are 80 child-rape cases. During the same period, two gang-rape cases, one custodial-rape case, and no rape-and-murder cases were reported. However, Balochistan has the best conviction ratio among the provinces of Pakistan, with 23 convictions to 90 acquittals, though this data implies about four acquittals for every conviction.

"The Anti-Rape Act was meant to replace a fragmented process with a coordinated system, in which every institution, from the police station and hospital to the prosecutor’s office and courtroom, would play its part. Instead, the gaps between these institutions continue to define the experience of survivors: evidence that may not be collected properly, investigations that stall, trials that drag on, and convictions that are too few to inspire confidence," Riazul Haq wrote in the report.

"The figures cannot reveal how many survivors were deterred from reporting their abuse, nor can they account for every case that never entered the official record. But they do raise a fundamental question about the state’s response to sexual violence. The measure of the law will ultimately lie not in the institutions established in its name, but in whether those institutions can deliver what the law promised," he added.

--IANS

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