Meet Karachi’s first female police superintendent

To protect and serve?

Shehla Qureshi, 30, commands eight police stations, is a vocal supporter of women’s rights and is the first woman to be appointed superintendent of Karachi, the most populated city in Pakistan.

“Police are the protectors of all rights, and there are no rights without women’s rights,” says Shehla.  She recognises the irony of a police force whose duty it is to ‘protect and serve’, in a society where so many women do not feel protected by the police. 

Shehla has been working with the Pakistan Forum for Democratic Policing (PFDP), supported by VSO, to change attitudes to the police, and to understand some of the barriers women experience when reporting crimes. According to a country-wide survey from 2012, more than half of Pakistani women who experience violence never tell anyone about it.

For many women, police stations can be intimidating environments, with armed guards stationed at the door. Attempts have been made to open up these spaces to women, by introducing a ‘women’s facilitation desk’ in each police station, manned by women police officers.

However, police stations remain male-dominated environments. In fact, Shehla is an outlier – in Pakistan, women make up just 1.5% of all police, up from 0.9% in 2015.

Why would any woman want to become a police officer?

Shehla is setting an example to a generation of girls in Pakistan, as the first woman to be appointed as superintendent of Karachi, but will any more women actually want to join?

Currently, many women working in Pakistan’s police stations are relegated to desk-based, junior positions, given little responsibility.

In Shehla’s own words, “Why would an intelligent woman want to join a poorly paid bureaucratic role which shuts down their potential?”

Even Shehla herself as superintendent is frequently treated like a junior and given no budget to work with, a very different experience to her male counterparts at a similar level.

Perceptions of police and a lack of women in the police force are exacerbating the problem of gender-based violence in Pakistan, as crimes against women go unpunished. Nearly a third of married women aged 15-49 have experienced physical violence from their husbands, according to a UN Women report.

Caught in a double bind

As a woman in Pakistan, if you want to accuse someone of rape, you will need a huge body of proof, finding at least four male eyewitnesses. DNA evidence is not considered enough for conviction.

At the same time, you may be prosecuted for having sex outside marriage, known as ‘zina’, in Pakistani society. This crime is punishable by death.

Women are caught in a double bind – unable to prosecute their rapist, and at risk of being prosecuted themselves.

Speaking to Karachi’s US consulate, Shehla said, “We cannot provide justice at the grassroot-level. Even when police plays its role, a victim must go through many other tricky legal procedures.”

Some laws protecting women have been introduced. For example, in 2015, the Protection of Women Against Violence Bill criminalised all forms of violence against women.

However, these laws are not widely implemented, and many women don’t even know they exist.