GUJRANWALA, Pakistan — Five women police officers on pink Vespa-style scooters ride through a series of ever-narrowing lanes and alleys in the concrete-and-dust town of Gujranwala in the Pakistani province of Punjab. They are part of a pilot program launched in September called “Pink Wheels,” which aims to address crimes against women and children by bringing help directly to their homes.
Here, like 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 likely encounter a police officer with a mustache,” says Muhammad Ayyaz Saleem, deputy inspector general for Gujranwala, who developed the Pink Wheels program.
He says a woman may be embarrassed to explain her complaint in a culture where men and women live largely segregated lives — and the male officer might not understand her complaint or may dismiss it.
Pakistan (and many other countries around the globe) have tried to address these problems 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 couches, it provides a safe space for women to file complaints informally before contacting a police station and assists victims with counseling and getting a lawyer.
But Saleem grew concerned that the Women’s Enclave was not serving women in rural areas and unable to leave their homes.
That’s why the Pink Wheels entered the picture.
A desperate calls comes in
One day this fall, that team of five female officers, led by 19-year-old Mahek Muneer, are responding to an emergency 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 riding scooters are a rarity in Pakistan, let alone women in uniforms on pink scooters wielding assault rifles.
Women smile as they pass.
But the reception is not always so friendly. “Men try to show us that the roads belong to them,” says officer Iman Aziz, 23. Sometimes, she says male bystanders hurl insults at the female officers.
Sometimes, the officers say, men try to chase them off the roads with their vehicles. Officer Maryam Khalil, 23, recounted an incident where three young men smashed into her squad 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 deeply conservative village nearby, and does not know the contours of her job.
Still, the women say they love riding the scooters — and being able to help other women report crimes.
Finding the woman who made the call
Today’s biggest challenge is locating the woman in distress. But then they meet a thin 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 showing them bruises on her face and neck. She says her husband had tried to strangle her.
After he heard that she complained to the police, she says that her spouse had also locked her and the children out of the house. “We are on the streets,” she cries.
Female neighbors crowd around, telling the officers that the husband regularly beat her and their children. Neighborhood men keep silent, and stay at a distance.
Khalil bangs on the door. When the husband opens it, Khalil pulls him out and handcuffs him. He smirks, and for a while ignores Khalil’s demand that he sit down on a nearby slab of stone covering a manhole. “Didn’t you hear me?” Khalil finally asks. “Sit down.”
He sits.
Aziz takes the woman into her home to take a statement, typing the information into an app on her iPad. She explains that this beating began after she went to a dentist to treat her toothache. When she came home, her husband flew into a rage, accusing her of having an affair.
The 13-year-old walks in, holding his five-month-old baby brother in his arms. The couple’s daughters, 12, and 9, stand close to her. “My daughter begged him not to kill me. She saved me,” the woman says.
She tells the officers that her husband had abused her for years, but she’d never complained to police because if she left him, she and her children would be destitute. She’d begged her father for her help, but he demanded she stay married because divorce would bring shame on their family. “It would be a black mark on my forehead,” she recalls her father saying.
She tells the officer, Aziz, that she considered suicide, but didn’t want to leave her children to their father. Her 12-year-old daughter bursts into tears. Her 9-year-old hugs her.
“He didn’t even acknowledge she was his,” the woman says, referring to her oldest girl, a serious allegation in Pakistan where even rumors of a woman’s infidelity can prompt relatives to kill her to defend the family’s reputation.
“Is that true?” Muneer asks the girl. She nods. “He always said I was born of ten different men.” Nearby, her father smirks.
After the female officers register the complaint through their app, a male officer arrives to arrest him. The smile vanishes from his face and his eyes widen in fear. (The female officers are responders, who register complaints. Even in this pilot to empower women to report crimes, male officers make the arrests.)
The woman asks if now, she would be safe, if she would get justice. “Our job is to register complaints,” says Khalil. “The courts will decide.”
But without reforms that see men reliably convicted for crimes against their wives or children, the initiative will fail, says Sidra Shehbaz, 38, a community activist in Gujranwala. “If victims don’t get justice, they will lose faith, just as they have already lost trust in male police,” she says.
One of the world’s worst countries for women
The challenges before police are steep.
Despite years of promises by a succession of governments to ensure the protection of women, Pakistan dropped in ranking from the fourth worst country in the world for women last year to the world’s worst in 2024, according to an annual ranking of 146 countries by the World Economic Forum. (The forum did not include Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in 2024, where women live markedly worse lives.)
The female police officers say the country would fare even more badly with precise data. Consider Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, with more than 127 million people. There were 10,103 reported cases of domestic violence in 2023. This year, the number is already higher at 13,295 reports by the end of August.
It’s not clear whether the increase reflects more women reporting to the police or more violence.
But there are signs that the various efforts made in Gujranwala to encourage women to report crimes are working. The city’s population is some 6 million people, which is less than 5% of the province, but they report 10% of all domestic violence cases.
It remains to be seen what kind of impact Pink Wheels project can have on these numbers — and in the lives of other Pakistani women.
On social media, the officers say they are derided as “Pinky Force,” something silly and unserious. And when they are responding to calls, neighbors often gather and tell them how to handle the situation. “When women are being beaten, they don’t come forward to help. But they all have advice for us,” Muneer says dryly.
Her colleague, officer Sultan laughs. “Of course, people think women don’t know how to handle things,” she says. “But we know what to do.”
Veengas, who goes by just her first name, is a Karachi-based journalist. Diaa Hadid contributed reporting from Mumbai, India.