In the era of 2019 and 2020, women in Punjab had gone through shockingly high occurrences of harassment, rape, sexual assault, kidnapping and domestic violence, recording 8,797 cases in 2020 while 8,767 in 2019.
These facts are stated from the fourth Punjab Gender Parity Report 2019 and 2020 organized by the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women.
Rape was the greatest recounted crime against women with the maximum number of 4,732 cases reporting from Lahore in 2020.
The report describes a comprehensive view of gender parity in Punjab through six thematic areas of justice, education, demographics, health, governance, economic participation, and opportunities, along with special initiatives.
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In accordance with the report, Lahore also listed the maximum integer of domestic violence cases in 2020 with 345 however there was a general drop of 3.5 percent in such cases i.e. from 1,158 in 2019 to 1,118 in 2020.
Worryingly, the provincial capital also informed the maximum number of sex crimes in 2020 reporting 614 cases out of a total of 4,056 in Punjab, yet a total decrease of 0.8 percent was noted in such cases i.e. from 4,090 in 2019 to 4,056 in 2020.
The acid burning cases observed a 24 percent decline in the two years under conversation with 37 cases registered in 2019 to 28 in 2020 with Faisalabad recording the maximum number of such cases in 2020 with eight.
Meanwhile, the number of abduction/kidnapping cases reduced by 1.7 percent within two years with a maximum number of 614 cases recorded in Lahore in 2020.
However, honor killings saw a rise of 20 percent in these two years with Faisalabad and Sargodha reporting the highest numbers of 19 cases each in 2020.
Moreover, the report also informs about an update on the application status of special initiatives and measures taken by the government, with those part of the Women Development Policy2018, and the current bill passed by the federal and Punjab assemblies.
