Building partnerships for scaling access to justice for survivors of sexual violence in Pakistan

This module is designed to train community workers as paralegals to aid and assist survivors of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) to recognize themselves as right-holders and access appropriate response services to mitigate and recover from the harm suffered by them. Unlike conventional paralegals, the principal role of community paralegals is not to assist lawyers, but rather to work directly with the communities they serve and act as knowledge banks navigating help seekers to vital response services. As community workers possess a deep understanding of the social issues and everyday challenges faced by women and girls in their community, they are uniquely positioned to promote empowerment by fostering legal awareness in the community and creating linkages with relevant services.

This report sets out to monitor the protocols established for the GBV Court in Lahore via a series of court observations and study of selected judgements. The aim of this exercise was to not only monitor and assess the implementation of the specialized protocols designed for the functioning of the Court but to also evaluate the performance of the Court and propose recommendations for its improved operations. Dastak monitored proceedings in the GBV Court to mark trends in the application of the human rights-based approach and gender sensitivity in the prosecution of GBV cases. This monitoring also included eliciting feedback from judges, prosecutors and other relevant actors present within the Court. Judicial decisions of the GBV court were also collected for an evidence-based study of trends such as rate of convictions and acquittal and the time taken to decide a case etc. These observations and monitoring will be used for advocacy on legislative and/or procedural reform.

Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is a prevalent issue faced by vulnerable segments of the population and disproportionately impacts women in Pakistan. While legislative and policy reforms have been endorsed at the state level to protect women their activation and implementation remains in a limbo. Focus on legislation and policy reform remains greater than enforcement of such laws and the establishment of protection mechanisms contained within. This and other factors including lack of resources, lack of awareness and inter-departmental coordination and under trained staff directly contribute to the weak response and underreporting of GBV. Having a strong understanding of the key challenges and hurdles in survivors’ access to justice and protection through Dastak’s extensive work in the field, this project was designed to focus on promoting the activation and/or usage of existing services within the Punjab Women Protection System (PWPS), increase interplay between Dastak’s work and state mechanisms, develop tools that to aid responders in the field to use WPS more effectively and improve the quality of response given to survivors of GBV.

Beauty salons serve as safe community spaces where those who come to avail services often discuss/share their personal stories and domestic concerns. Having developed outreach in communities through its paralegals, Dastak saw this as an opportunity to improve knowledge on marriage rights and outreach of its services by providing basic training and information material to beauticians/salon owners and to enable them to guide their female clients as well as their employees to resources and knowledge concerning matters related to marriage and domestic violence.

Dastak’s Crisis Management Center served as the first line of contact for all new arrivals, managed the daily running and decision making in the shelter, provided legal assistance and advice as well as maintaining all resident data. During the project period, one of Dastak’s primary goals was to improve service delivery through a coordinated and collective response and bringing crisis management and shelter practices in line with the human rights-based approach. In this regard, various practices were changed, certain operations streamlined and improved, and new systems put in place to improve data management systems and active engagement with state run services. This report outlines a detailed analysis of the interventions made during the period, drawing from the data recorded in a customized shelter database. The learnings from analysis of the practices and interventions also led to improvement in interagency relations and internal practices.