This is the sentence that protects every abuser in Pakistan

Sana stood outside the gates of the police station with her young son, clutching her hand as she trembled from fear of what people would say if she went inside. The 26-year-old had been subjected to four years of physical, emotional and financial violence at home, and now her husband was threatening to leak their private videos. What held her back was not fear of her abuser but a sentence she had heard her whole life: Sharif larkiyaan thaney nahi jaati. Good girls don’t go to police stations. At our gate, Sana was not just dealing with her husband’s violence but also battling a deeper, more systemic violence in the shape of a belief system that decided how far she was allowed to seek justice. This story is not an isolated one. I often hear it as a Sub-Divisional Police Officer serving with the Sindh Police. Each complainant who happens to be a woman or her family apologises to me: “We come from a respectable family. We have never stepped inside a police station.” This disclaimer signals that the act of going to the police needs to be justified. When women say it, the police station ceases to operate as an institutional space where you can report a crime, and it morphs into a dangerous site where you imperil your social identity. There is a striking pattern to this pre-emptive stigma neutralisation. The disclaimer is the same no matter what the crime. It is given when a woman’s husband breaks her arm at home in Larkana, she is raped by her employer in Landhi, threatened by her own uncles in Mirpurkhas, and even when she loses her life savings to some scammer bro sitting in Ratodero with a 5G connection. The subtext is always the same: If you do go to a police station, you will no longer be considered respectable. This is classic patriarchal control over a woman’s mobility and voice. A sharif aurat is constructed around notions of modesty, obedience and invisibility in public spaces. At the same time, police stations in Pakistan have been historically associated with