Pakistan’s police have historically displayed significant apathy towards recruiting women, considering them unsuitable for this profession
. The social stigma of working in a notorious, male-dominated organization has also prevented many women from joining in the past. Today, female police officers comprise just over 3% of the Pakistani police. This book is the first to examine their experiences within it. It draws on extensive ethnographic research on female police officers of all ranks in cities across Pakistan to illustrate the diversity of their recruitment, roles, experiences, and career prospects across rank, cadre, and region. It also demonstrates how female officers are combatting patriarchal challenges to make greater inroads into a masculine terrain, taking on diverse roles, and playing an increasingly important role in supporting women’s access to justice, and why these changes cannot be conflated with the idea that these will automatically and radically transform the organization itself.
PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS Chapter 1. Policing: An Historical, Cultural Product Chapter 2. “I am very happy!” Knowledge Production in a Hierarchical Field PART TWO: PEOPLE, PLACES Chapter 3. An Unequal Playing Field: The Police as a Gendered Organisation Chapter 4. Patriarchal Social Landscapes: The Family and Community Chapter 5. Privileges, Possibilities and Differentials: Female Officers in Senior Ranks Chapter 6. “Woman Thaanas”: An Ambiguous Status PART THREE: ORGANISATIONAL EMBEDDEDNESS AND ENTANGLEMENTS Chapter 7. “Culture bara heavy hai” (The culture is very strong): Gender and Police Corruption Chapter 8. Police Violence: Organisational Logics, Constraints and Moral Subjectivities Chapter 9. Continuity and Change: The Complexity of Gender Progress
Sadaf Ahmad is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS, Lahore, Pakistan. She completed her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Syracuse University in the USA and is the author of Transforming Faith: A Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism Among Urban Pakistani Women.
Reviews for Female Police Officers in Pakistan: Diverse Realities, Continuities and Change
This is an important work, the kind that advances our understanding of changing gendered power relations, women’s agency, and social transformations occurring throughout Pakistan. It addresses the important issue of policing which has been shrouded in controversy due to the fears most women have of going to a police station. Ahmed deftly addresses the impact of the introduction of female police officers and female police stations and the actual multi-faceted impacts they have had on both society and on the lives of the women police officers themselves. -- Anita M. Weiss, Professor Emerita, University of Oregon, US; author of Interpreting Islam, Modernity and Women’s Rights in Pakistan Rights in Pakistan
