In 2015, when I chose the topic of rape jurisprudence in Pakistan for my senior year project at LUMS, there was no ChatGPT, no AI research tools, and no readily accessible databases synthesising feminist legal theory for South Asia. There was also little encouragement. Senior year projects were typically done in groups of three or four students; I chose to work alone. Many told me it was unnecessary, impractical, and ultimately useless.
I spent my winter vacations on campus, reading more than ten books on rape law, criminology, sociology, and feminist legal theory. I designed and conducted a survey that gathered over 200 responses from students and members of the general public in Multan. I conducted interviews
on a subject that made rooms fall silent and conversations deeply uncomfortable. Throughout this process, I was repeatedly reminded that many students were submitting forged surveys and fabricated interviews and still receiving top grades with minimal effort.
For me, this was never just a degree requirement. I was trying to understand why Pakistan reports such a high incidence of rape, why conviction rates remain abysmally low, and how a culture of impunity is sustained by law itself. I did not plan to publish the research; it happened almost accidentally. Yet it became the foundation of my academic work. Most of my publications since then have focused on sexual violence, consent, and the systemic failures that surround them.
Pakistan’s rape jurisprudence is not moving forward because it refuses to confront its own biases. Until courts stop equating uncertainty with consent and morality with legality, justice will remain elusive. And still, we write. We research. We dissent. Because silence has never protected anyone
Years later, when Justice Ayesha A. Malik cited my paper in her dissent in Muhammad Imran v State, I felt something rare in legal scholarship: vindication. Not merely professional recognition, but moral clarity. In a judicial landscape that routinely doubts women, pathologises survivors, and demands impossible standards of resistance, it felt as if my work was standing with a judge who insisted that the law could and should do better.
That is why the majority opinions in Muhammad Imran v State and, more recently, Hassan v State are not only legally troubling; they are personally devastating.
“Imran v State”: When Absence of Resistance Becomes Proof of Consent
In Imran v State, the Supreme Court overturned concurrent convictions for rape and converted the offence into fornication under Section 496-B of the Pakistan Penal Code. The majority relied on familiar and deeply problematic assumptions, including delay in lodging the FIR, the absence
of physical injuries, perceived familiarity between the parties, and stereotypical expectations of how a genuine rape victim should behave. This reasoning reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how sexual violence occurs. Modern rape jurisprudence recognises that victims may freeze, comply to survive, or be unable to resist due to fear, coercion, or power imbalance. Justice Malik’s dissent correctly emphasised that reading consent into such circumstances collapses the legal distinction between submission and consent.
Equally troubling was the doctrinal incoherence of converting a rape charge into fornication. Fornication requires affirmative proof of mutual consent, not merely the prosecution’s failure to prove rape beyond reasonable doubt. Where rape is not proven, the legally sound outcome is acquittal, not the creation of a new offence that was never alleged, charged, or defended. This approach quietly revives the logic of the Zina regime by reintroducing moral judgment into what should be a strictly legal inquiry.
“Hassan v State”: Rewriting Consent Once Again
In Hassan v State, the pattern repeated itself. Once again, the Supreme Court converted a rape conviction into fornication, citing delay in lodging the FIR and absence of physical injuries. Once again, a dissenting judge cautioned that neither delay nor lack of injuries establishes consent. And once again, the majority treated ambiguity as proof against the survivor. Delay in reporting rape is not an anomaly in Pakistan; it is the norm, produced by fear of stigma, retaliation, familial pressure, and institutional hostility. To treat delay as evidence of consent is to punish survivors for navigating a society that already refuses to protect them.
Taken together, these judgments reveal a disturbing judicial tendency. When confronted with the discomfort of rape convictions, courts retreat into the language of consensual sex, even where no such case exists on record. This does not protect due process. It destabilises criminal law by allowing courts to invent offences based on conjecture rather than evidence.
At the heart of both judgments lies a profound misunderstanding of consent. Consent is situational, specific, and revocable at any moment. The mere fact that a man and a woman are in the same place at the same time, or share familiarity, history, or even prior intimacy, does not give a man the right to sexual access. Presence is not permission. Silence is not consent. Consent must exist at the moment of the act, not presumed beforehand and not reconstructed afterwards. When courts treat proximity or familiarity as implied consent, they legitimise entitlement and erode women’s bodily autonomy.
The Cost of Standing Still
When I began my research nearly a decade ago, there was very little Pakistani legal literature on rape from a feminist or empirical perspective. Today, more law students are engaging with these questions. And yet, the jurisprudence at the highest level remains stagnant.
What breaks my heart is not only the outcomes of these cases, but what they signal: that despite better laws, greater awareness, and richer scholarship, rape survivors still stand alone. They face a system that demands bruises, immediate reporting, and perfect behaviour, and when those impossible standards are not met, the law quietly shifts the burden onto them.
Patriarchy in jurisprudence is not always loud. Sometimes it speaks in neutral language, evidentiary thresholds, and the rhetoric of benefit of doubt. But its effect is the same: women are disbelieved, and violence is normalised.
When Justice Malik cited my work, it reminded me why scholarship matters, not because it guarantees victory, but because it records resistance. It shows that the law could have chosen differently.
Pakistan’s rape jurisprudence is not moving forward because it refuses to confront its own biases. Until courts stop equating uncertainty with consent and morality with legality, justice will remain elusive.
And still, we write. We research. We dissent. Because silence has never protected anyone.
