Summary of Remarks by Senator Bushra Anjum Butt at CSW70 High-Level Meeting on Violence Against Women

Senator Bushra Anjum Butt frames violence against women as one of the gravest human rights challenges of our time, noting its pervasive reach across homes, workplaces, digital spaces, conflict zones, and occupied territories, where it is systemic and sustained by impunity but preventable with political will and concerted action. She highlights Pakistan’s reforms, including criminalizing honor killings, strengthening anti-rape legislation, banning forced marriage and inheritance deprivation, and instituting protections against workplace harassment, along with a comprehensive strategy to combat technology-facilitated gender-based violence. Butt underscores the expansion of protection and response systems such as National and Provincial Commissions on the Status of Women, specialized courts, crisis centers, shelter homes, women police desks, mobile policing, and national helplines, complemented by technology-enabled safe-city projects and digital safety applications that enhance monitoring, reporting, and rescue efforts. She argues that violence erodes education, work, leadership, and dignity, making it not only a human rights crisis but also a development barrier and a peace deficit. To accelerate elimination, she advocates concrete actions: strengthening justice systems through fast-track courts, legal aid, and trauma services; transforming harmful social norms via education and male engagement; addressing technology-facilitated violence through monitoring and accountability; expanding women’s economic protections to reduce dependency; and investing in institutional capacity, including more women police officers, investigators, and prosecutors. Concluding with urgency, Butt calls for legislate, protect, prosecute, and, above all, transform the structures that allow violence to endure, so future generations of girls can live in safety and freedom.