As International Women’s Day approaches, women in Pakistan are gearing up to organise the annual Aurat March, or Women’s March. Online and offline, misogynist rhetoric has also been gaining ascendancy. Recently, Minister of Religious Affairs Noor-ul-Haq Qadri, put in a request for the prime minister to declare March 8 International Hijab Day instead, saying that the Aurat March is against Islamic teachings. Worse, the president of Jamiat Ulema-i- Islam-Fazl, a major political party led by clerics, threatened to use batons to stop the protesters. The Aurat March brings together Pakistani women to raise a collective voice against oppression in both private and public arenas. This year, the theme of the march, to be held separately in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, will be different, ranging from “reimagining justice” to labour and land rights. This reflects the way the movement is diversifying itself, a fitting response to long-standing allegations that the protesters are merely a club of privileged women in urban centres trying to appropriate the stories of all Pakistani women. 📢🔔 Aurat March Lahore is proud to announce its Manifesto for 2022 centering on the theme of #ReimaginingJustice . Link to Manifesto: https://t.co/dPUNZtOTBJ . Tweet using the hashtag #AsalInsaaf , about what insaaf means to you. #AuratMarch2022 pic.twitter.com/Xy6SIDX3s1 — عورت مارچ لاہور - Aurat March Lahore (@AuratMarch) February 18, 2022 Despite their efforts to introduce a variety of issues into the mainstream discourse, march participants and organisers alike have drawn vitriol on the premise that the march promotes “obscenity” and “hooliganism”. Since 2018 – the year when the first Aurat March was held in Karachi – the tirade against the women’s movement has continued unabated. Public awareness of the aims of these protest marches is low. The annual event is often reduced to a cultural assault influenced by the West. This simplification disregards the fact that Pakistani women have been at the forefront of highlighting critical local issues: for instance, the Baloch women protesting against the enforced disappearances of their menfolk. In 2021, the gender gap in Pakistan worsened by 0.7 percentage points compared to 2020. Furthermore, the Ministry of Human Rights reported 16,153 cases of sexual violence against women, including workplace harassment, in the last four years. Here, it should be noted that the majority of women in Pakistan do not report such incidents because they carry sociocultural stigmas. Meanwhile, a court in Islamabad has sentenced to death Zahir Jaffer, a business tycoon’s son, for the brutal murder of a childhood acquaintance, Noor Mukadam. Even though the verdict was hailed as a victory for justice and a big win for women across Pakistan, the issues that surfaced in the course of the investigation and the trial still reveal the incapacity of the justice system. Character assassination and victim blaming got under way within and outside court walls, with some wondering what the deceased was doing near the murderer in the first place. In another case, Muhammad Waseem had been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his sister , social media star Qandeel Baloch, but was recently acquitted by the Lahore High Court after serving less than six years in prison. Although there have been varying verdicts in cases of gender-based violence and a number of those accused have been given capital punishment over the years, the sustained disregard of women’s voices by the state and society shows that the problem is much deeper. Measures that are more punitive than preventive do not address the mindsets that lead to violence against women. The criminal justice system has severe flaws that need to be addressed, whether it is filing a case or convicting a perpetrator. In a system where women’s testimony has half the legal weight of men’s in various civil matters, it is understandable that a death penalty verdict would be seen as a win. Beheaded, groped, beaten: violence against Asian women at alarming levels Given the history of gender-based violence in Pakistan and the insensitive approach to such cases, the impression that is inescapable is that the state machinery is a silent collaborator in sustaining masculine dominance in social and structural spheres. In a society such as ours, a women’s march is more a necessity than a gimmick, whatever many would like to believe. It is because violence has become normalised in our collective conscience that this act of resistance, in the form of the Aurat March, should continue with more rigour and enthusiasm. This is precisely what is needed, and the patriarchal backlash against the movement is testimony to the fact that Pakistani women’s efforts to regain their agency are puncturing some bloated, misogynistic male egos. Saman Rizwan is an independent analyst and is a graduate of international relations from S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore. She tweets @sa__rizwan