Gauging the Basis of Gendered Crime in Pakistan: Depicting the Insider's View of the Key Players

Abstract

In Pakistan, crime against women is a notable daily issue. As explored by Mughal (2018), certain violent norms like honor killing are glamorized and desensitized in the name of culture and tradition, which can put live sat stake. Consistently, this phenomenon is contributing to the rate of crime against women, how crime is aligned with the honor and dignity of the group/tribe and why both men, as well as women, extend support to the offenders who indulged in criminal offenses against women. This issue has been missed out from insiders' view in the current literature. Consistently, qualitative research has been conducted to explore this missing between practice and research and contribute to the body of literature. This field data has been acquired from prisoners from Adiala jail to assess the influence of religion-patriarchy-based cultural values on their understanding of crime. Additionally, the professionals serving in law enforcement agencies have also been reached out to explore their perception of the ongoing practices of crime against women and its impact on pursuing cases against criminals. The results show that ingrained religion-patriarchal cultural values have created a general mindset that prevails in all segments of society, i.e., commoner-professional, men-women, offenders- officers working in the judicial system etc.; and in turn, desensitizes crime against women.