Media and Human Rights: An Analysis of Press Coverage of Rape Victims in Pakistan, 2025–2026

Abstract

This article analyses how the Pakistani press covered rape and other forms of sexual violence between January 2025 and August 2026, and asks what that coverage does to the human rights of survivors. Drawing on framing theory and on a human-rights reading of dignity, privacy and equality, it triangulates three kinds of real-time evidence: official and NGO incidence data for 2024–2026; the statutory and self-regulatory rules that already bind Pakistani journalists; and published content analyses, editorials and investigative reports in English- and Urdu-language media. The empirical picture is grim and not invented. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan recorded 6,624 registered rapes in 2023, one every 45 minutes. Police data compiled by the Sustainable Social Development Organization show 5,339 rapes in 2024, 4,641 of them in Punjab, with conviction rates below 2 per cent. HRCP’s 2025 annual report, launched in May 2026, found a 25 per cent rise in reported gender-based violence over eleven months, including 3,815 rapes. Sahil’s newspaper-based Cruel Numbers counted 3,630 child-abuse cases in 2025, an 8 per cent year-on-year increase. Pakistan ranked last of 148 economies in the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Index. Against that backdrop, the press remains both a human-rights actor and a human-rights risk. The Anti-Rape (Investigation and Trial) Act 2021, PEMRA’s code of conduct and the Press Council’s ethical code all forbid identification of survivors, yet empirical studies of Pakistani electronic and print media document systematic naming, family identification, use of the word “alleged,” and victim-blaming frames. The 2025–2026 record shows a dual pattern: constructive, rights-based reporting around Anti-Rape Crisis Cells and child-protection data on the one hand, and sensational, episodic, honor-coded coverage amplified by social media and chilled by PECA and defamation law on the other. The article argues that survivor-centred journalism is not a courtesy. It is a justiciable human-rights duty, and the gap between Pakistan’s rules and its newsrooms is itself a rights violation.

Keywords: Pakistan; Rape, Press Ethics, Human Rights; Framing, PEMRA; Anti-Rape Act 2021, Sahil, HRCP, Survivor-Centred Journalism