Pakistani policewomen: questioning the role of gender in circumscribing police corruption

ABSTRACT

The popular belief that women are more honest and morally superior than men, shared by many feminist theorists, development practitioners and policy makers across the globe, subsequently informs another belief, that increasing the number of women in a corrupt organisation will therefore reduce the levels of corruption in said organisation. This year-long ethnographic research on Pakistani policewomen, based on participant observation and interviews with policewomen across different ranks and in different police branches in nine Pakistani cities, critically interrogates this narrative. More specifically, it claims that while a gendered reason – policewomen's positionality as women within the world of policing – plays a critical role in circumscribing the degree to which and the kinds of corrupt activities they engage in, gender is not a very useful category to use when thinking about reducing police corruption levels in Pakistan given the socio-political and institutional structures in which the Pakistani police are enmeshed. This culturally grounded study thus makes an empirically rooted contribution to exploring the relationship between policewomen, gender, and corruption, which is currently underdeveloped in the global literature on policewomen and completely absent in the literature on policewomen in Pakistan.

KEYWORDS:

• Pakistan
• gender
• policewomen
• corruption

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The ranks of the police officers mentioned in this article are the rank they held in the time period in which I conducted this research – the years 2015 and 2016.

2 The names and identifying features of police officers and the spaces in which they work have been altered in those instances where their behaviour or disclosure may put them at risk.

3 The Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) funded this research via its Faculty Initiative Fund (FIF).

4 The Prevention of Corruption Act (1947) and the Pakistan Penal Code (1960) make corruption a criminal offense.

5 The police occupational culture varies across police forces and is dependent on factors like the qualities of people occupying leadership positions in particular departments (Workman-Stark 2017). I do not intend to portray it as a monolith and I am aware that some police forces, like the National Highways and Motorway Police, have a better reputation in this context. However, this generalisation is reflective of people's experience of the police, especially those who work in police stations, and is well documented in reports (see, for instance, Ata-ullah and Ijaz 2016).

6 People who succeed in their Central Superior Services (CSS) examinations become eligible to join a department in the civil service in Pakistan. The Police Service of Pakistan (PSP) is one of these departments. Those who join the PSP enter the police force directly as an ASP, an officer rank, and have greater authority and status than their counterparts who (called ‘rankers’ in police jargon) have reached the same rank through promotions.

7 There is usually only 1 WPS in a large city. Karachi is the exception with 3 WPSs.

8 Parents often file kidnapping charges when their daughter runs away from home. This gives the police the pretext to search for her.

9 See Khan (2018) to read about the recent police anti-corruption drive in the province of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Faculty Initiative Fund (FIF), LUMS [grant number FIF-SHS-2077].