Author
HALF SAFE: WHY PAKISTAN’S HARASSMENT LAW STOPS AT THE OFFICE DOOR
Progress at work, neglect beyond — the unfinished promise of women’s protection in Pakistan.
In 2010, Pakistan took a landmark step by enacting the Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act. The law signalled that women had a right to dignity at work, free from intimidation or abuse. Yet more than a decade later, that promise remains partial. The 2022 Amendment widened its reach — but both its conceptual framing and institutional design still fail to address the broader battlefield women face: homes, streets, informal work, digital spaces, and an often sensationalist media landscape.
The Promise of the 2010 Act
The Act (IV of 2010), assented to on 9 March 2010, sought “to make provisions for the protection against harassment of women at the workplace.” Drawing from the Constitution’s recognition of the “fundamental rights of citizens to dignity of person”, it required all public and private organisations to adopt a Code of Conduct and establish Inquiry Committees.
For many women, it was a long-overdue recognition of their right to safety and dignity in professional life — rights long asserted but seldom realised.
The 2022 Amendment: Expansion without Transformation
After sustained critique over narrow definitions and limited reach, the Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace (Amendment) Act, 2022 broadened the meaning of “workplace,” “employee,” and “harassment,” extending coverage to freelancers, domestic workers, and virtual workspaces. It brought the law closer to the spirit of ILO Convention 190 (though Pakistan has yet to ratify it) and added “discrimination on the basis of gender” to the definition of harassment — an important, but still incomplete, conceptual shift.
Conceptual Limitation — The Nadia Naz Case
The law’s core limitation lies in its conceptual framing. Section 2(h) of the original Act defined harassment as any “unwelcome sexual advance, request for sexual favours, or other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature.”
In the landmark case Nadia Naz v. President of Islamic Republic of Pakistan (2021 SCMR 1004), the Supreme Court held that the 2010 Act was confined to “sexual” harassment, not broader gender-based abuse or discrimination. This ruling closed the door to complaints about gendered humiliation, marginalization, exclusion, or hostility that lacked a sexual component — conduct equally capable of violating a woman’s dignity.
While the 2022 Amendment added “gender discrimination” to the definition, it did not reframe harassment as a continuum of gender-based violence beyond the workplace. The result is a law that reduces systemic inequality to isolated acts of sexual misconduct within an employer–employee relationship.
This narrow lens has shaped institutional and social understandings of harassment — compressing a deep-rooted social pathology into a procedural workplace offence, while leaving untouched the real sources of power, entitlement, and silence.
Legal Limitation I — Jurisdiction Confined to Workplace
Under Section 2(f), “employee” was originally defined through formal engagement — excluding the vast majority of women working in Pakistan’s informal economy. Over 60% of working women in Pakistan labour without contracts, often in homes, fields, or small workshops.
The 2022 Amendment expanded the definition to cover educational institutions, performances, public venues, and virtual spaces, yet most informal realities still fall outside its scope. Domestic workers, street vendors, gig freelancers, and unpaid family contributors remain largely unprotected and invisible to the law’s protective architecture.
Legal Limitation II — Employment-Centric Machinery
The Act depends on an employer-based hierarchy: internal committees, designated authorities, and an Ombudsman as appellate forum. This model presupposes an organisational structure — but harassment in Pakistan often occurs where none exists.
Women in domestic or informal work, public transport, or online spaces face abuse without an identifiable employer or HR mechanism. For them, the law offers no entry point for justice. Although the Act claims to operate “in addition to and not in derogation of any other law,” in practice, it remains siloed — failing to link with labour, cybercrime, or child protection frameworks.
Institutional Limitation — Complaint-Driven and Reactive
The Act’s institutional design is reactive: it waits for a complaint before it acts. This model assumes awareness, access, and courage — assumptions that exclude many women bound by fear, dependence, or social stigma.
Its weaknesses are structural:
- It applies mainly to organised settings, not informal or domestic spaces.
- It functions in isolation from public institutions such as police, regulators, or welfare departments.
- It focuses on punishment after violation, not on prevention or reform.
Without inter-agency coordination or preventive mandates, the system remains fragmented, intimidating, and largely inaccessible to the most vulnerable.
The Battlefield Beyond the Office
The real battlefield lies not in boardrooms but in homes, classrooms, markets, and digital platforms — where law rarely enters. A domestic worker facing abuse in a private home, a commuter enduring harassment on a bus, or a woman targeted through online hate and voyeurism — all encounter the same impasse: social silence and fragmented redress.
Meanwhile, a sensationalist media culture amplifies women’s tragedies into spectacle. Vulgar social media clips and exploitative coverage reinforce objectification and moral corrosion.
And what of the “little babies” — young girls, domestic helpers, informal vendors, digital freelancers — whose “workplace” is a vendor’s stall, a kitchen, or a screen? They remain unseen by the current law: uncounted, unprotected, unheard.
Adjudication Is Not Enough
The complaint-based model addresses symptoms, not causes. It treats harassment as isolated incidents rather than a reflection of structural inequality and cultural permissiveness. Adjudication punishes individuals but cannot dismantle systemic misogyny, moral policing, or media vulgarity.
Without prevention, education, media oversight, institutional credibility and inter-agency coordination, law remains reactive — a fire brigade in a city that refuses to stop lighting matches.
The Way Forward: Toward a Holistic Protection Framework
- Legislative Reorientation
- Expand the current Act — or enact a new Protection Against Gender-Based Harassment and Violence Act — covering all forms of work and all locations.
- Redefine harassment to include gender-hostile, exclusionary, or intimidating conduct.
- Ensure specific protections for children, adolescents, domestic workers, and unpaid family helpers.
- Institutional Integration
- Link the Ombudsman’s system with labour inspectorates, ICT regulators, and social protection agencies.
- Create one-window “gender justice desks” at district and provincial levels for all complaints — workplace, public, domestic, or digital.
- Mandate preventive and monitoring functions: oversee media content, engage social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook, TikTok) against misogynistic material, and promote awareness campaigns on respect and dignity.
- Cultural and Preventive Reform
- Shift national discourse from “protection at work” to “dignity everywhere.”
- Enforce ethical media codes against voyeuristic or sensationalist reporting of gender violence.
- Train employers, unions, informal-sector associations, and digital moderators in harassment prevention and response.
Economic Dimension of Women’s Protection
Women’s protection is not only a moral or legal necessity — it is an economic imperative. With women comprising nearly half of Pakistan’s population, their exclusion and insecurity represent a profound loss of national productivity.
Gender-based insecurity functions as an invisible tax on the economy — deterring women’s participation, reducing educational returns, and weakening household resilience. Research shows that narrowing the gender gap could boost Pakistan’s GDP by billions annually.
Safety, therefore, is an economic issue. A woman who feels unsafe at home, at work, or in public cannot contribute fully to national growth.
Islamic injunctions, constitutional guarantees, and international commitments all converge on the same moral axis:
- Islam upholds women’s honour and protection as a social duty.
- The Constitution (Articles 25, 27, 34, 35, and 37) guarantees equality, family protection, and participation of women in all spheres.
- International commitments, including CEDAW and SDG 5, bind Pakistan to eliminate discrimination and empower women.
Yet Pakistan ranks 148th out of 148 countries on the Global Gender Gap Index (2025) — a stark indicator of the gulf between law, policy, and lived reality.
A secure, educated, and economically active woman is not a mere beneficiary of development — she is its driver. Real progress requires mindset change, institutional credibility, and the translation of rights from paper to practice.
Conclusion
The Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act (2010) and its 2022 Amendment mark progress but remain confined to the easiest domain — the formal workplace. They do not address where most women’s lives unfold: the home, the street, the market, the screen.
Unless Pakistan’s legal and institutional imagination evolves to meet women where they truly live and work, protection will remain partial and reactive. The transformation required is one that moves from:
- legalism to justice,
- adjudication to prevention,
- workplace committees to integrated gender justice, and
- formal employment to every space where women live and move.
Dignity must cease to be a statutory promise and become a lived condition — the birthright of every woman and girl in Pakistan. The measure of a just society is not how it punishes after harm, but how it protects before harm occurs.