Nighat Dad is not an easy woman to find. The Digital Rights Foundation (DRF), an advocacy organization she founded in 2012, has just launched Pakistan’s first cyber harassment helpline, and I’m in Lahore to see how it works. But the DRF office is located in a residential area of the city, and I quickly get lost within its winding, narrow lanes. I try to find my way by using the map application on my phone. Nothing shows up.
I think I have found the office at the end of a lane that curves away from a small patch of green where children in this neighbourhood come to play in the evenings. As I am about to ring the bell, a woman taking out the garbage opens the gate. I ask her if she works at the DRF office. She gives me a blank look and shakes her head. “There’s no office in this lane,” she says.
The gate next door opens, and a guard steps out. The house looks like any other on the street until you notice the thicket of barbed wire along the top of its boundary walls. The guard won’t confirm or deny if this is the office for the Digital Rights Foundation or if Nighat is inside. He rests his hand on the gun holstered at his hip while I call her. She sends someone outside to fetch me.
This is my first time meeting Nighat. She travels frequently and we have only ever been able to speak on Skype. The first thing I notice is her easy smile. Her mouth is painted a bright crimson, and metallic-red hair sweeps across her forehead. A few forest-green locks peek out from under the shawl she has wound around her neck. She apologizes for how difficult it is to find the office. It is not locatable with any map app, and the people at the office do not chat with the neighbours. There are people who do not like Nighat and the work she is doing, and she does not want to make it easy for them to find her.
This morning Nighat is tired and only has a little time to spare before she has to leave for a presentation about the helpline at a local college. She thinks it’s for two or three dozen people, but then receives a call from the woman organizing the event: the college has received a flood of requests once word got out that Nighat would be there. There are now close to a hundred attendees.
Since 2010 Nighat has been travelling across the country to conduct training sessions for Internet users—many of them women—who want to learn how to protect themselves and their identities online. At one such session one of the participants was a young girl from Swat, at the time under the control of the Taliban, who would go on to capture the world’s attention when her then-anonymous blogs and her call for education for girls earned her a bullet in the head: Malala Yousafzai.
Nighat soon started to receive messages in her Facebook inbox from women who had attended her workshops. They were being harassed, blackmailed, or threatened online, and they were hesitant to approach a government agency, or their friends or family members for help. They were scared of being dismissed, judged or punished. In many cases they were unable to talk to a family member because they were forbidden to be on sites like Facebook in the first place. Many of those being blackmailed by current or former partners could not admit to their families that they were in a relationship—in one 2014 case a fourteen-year-old girl was blackmailed into repeated gang rapes when her boyfriend threatened to release a video he had secretly shot of them.1 Word of mouth was slowly spreading that Nighat was the woman to approach if you were having problems with your online presence, or if your email had been hacked or your online security breached.
In 2015 Nighat was named one of Time magazine’s “next generation leaders” for her work. She was suddenly one of the best-known digital rights activists in the region. The attention was a blessing for DRF, but it soon took a toll on Nighat. Her inbox was flooded with pleas for help from women across the country, and she felt increasingly helpless and exhausted, terrified of missing even a single message from a distraught stranger. When she mentioned this to a friend, her friend had an idea: why not share the load? Why didn’t she start Pakistan’s first cyber-harassment helpline?
By July 2016 Nighat had started to reach out to people who could help her set up the helpline and was mulling over how best to do it. Then news broke of Qandeel’s murder. On 15 July, the day before her body was discovered in her home in Multan, Qandeel had posted a message on her social media platforms: “I believe I am a modern day feminist…I am just a women with free thoughts, free mindset and I LOVE THE WAY I AM…” In the days after her murder many reports in the international media would echo this description of Qandeel, praising her as a feminist icon. She had become a role model, “a one-woman revolution against religiously and culturally justified misogyny” (Daily Beast). In the Pakistani media some obituaries followed the same vein. She was no longer ridiculed or criticized, but embraced by the very people who had once scorned or ignored her. “Qandeel Baloch is dead because we hate women who don’t conform,” explained the cultural editor of Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, Dawn. “Qandeel Baloch was an unapologetic rebel,” lamented another journalist. There were slideshows of her photographs and listicles of “10 powerful quotes by Qandeel Baloch.”
However, the online conversation was very different. In the week that followed Qandeel’s murder, Nighat found herself targeted online for condemning the killing. Today she sits at her laptop, its cover scattered with stickers—Challenge Power!, Back Up Your Data!, and Queen in bright pink letters—and reads out some of the messages she received.
“You seem to be following her pathetic footsteps.”
“Show your boldness and put off your clothes as Qandeel used to do.”
“Do you want to spread pornography in whole country?”
“Kill yourself.”
“After QB it will be ND.”
These are some of the milder posts. Some of the activists Nighat knows were being trolled, receiving rape and death threats, and being slut-shamed online after they spoke out against Qandeel’s murder by her brother. Many of Nighat’s friends deactivated their social media accounts because they were intimidated by the messages they received after they expressed grief or anger over Qandeel’s killing or shared any news stories that were favourable towards her. Three days after the murder, a story on the BBC detailed the kinds of threats that some female journalists were facing when they spoke about Qandeel Baloch. “I’ve been recently trolled on Facebook for posting a status update on how we, as a society, failed Qandeel Baloch,” said Iram Abbasi, a reporter. “One user said I didn’t have a ‘good family background.’ Another asked how I could come from a reputable family if I wore sleeveless shirts. For the same reason, another user said I was wearing ‘dirty’ and ‘un-Islamic’ clothing.”2
On Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds were flooded with messages from Pakistanis who believed the murder, an “honour killing,” had been just.
“Finally #QandeelBaloch murdered,” tweeted one woman. “Someone had to do it. She was disgrace for the country…”
“Good news,” wrote another. “She was just indecent and a dishonourable woman.”
“She was going out of hand.”
“She’s certainly gonna suffer in hell. Her brother did well.”
“Where there is no honor in killing, there are hoes like #QandeelBaloch. Honor killing is a good thing sometimes.”
“Finally a good news after long time :p.”
Qandeel’s critics attacked her social media pages.
“Unfollow this account, she is spoiling Pakistan’s name,” urged one Instagram user.
“She was a vile human being no pride in herself and in Pakistan and with a body like that I’ll be hiding it not displaying it,” added another.
“This woman is a disgusting slut,” one user wrote, accusing Qandeel and her supporters of pandering to the West. “People in Pakistan are desperately seeking to be like North Americans, mimicking their lives but you never will be. Embrace your culture, religion, and country…”
Another wrote, “People like this should be shot.”
“I couldn’t tolerate it any more,” Nighat says. She was receiving calls from women who were worried about their privacy settings and what their friends, family members or work colleagues could see on their social media pages. They felt overwhelmed by the stream of hate speech targeting anyone who spoke out against Qandeel’s murder. Nighat herself wanted to go offline. “I realised that if I needed to talk to somebody about the threats I was receiving online, I had no one to turn to,” she recalls. “Who was I supposed to go to?”
She knew she could not delay the helpline any longer. There was just one problem: she had no money.
Nighat was a university undergraduate when she entered an online chat room for the first time. It was the early 2000s. Desktop computers were all the rage—by 2007 there would be machines in five million homes in cities like Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad,3 and Nighat’s brother-in-law, whom she lived with, had just bought one for the house.
By 1992 dial-up Internet was available in urban centres in the country, but it would be a few years before Internet service providers began offering low-cost packages. In 2000 only 133,900 Pakistanis were online,4 and Nighat was one of them. The arrival of mIRC (Internet Relay Chat) software was a revelation: a whole world of strangers outside the tight circle of her family and school friends, all accessible whenever she wanted, and none of them knew her real name. At the University of Punjab in Lahore, where she was studying law, all the girls she knew were nervous about talking to boys—or rather about being seen talking to boys. For most of them, including Nighat, even the hint of some interest from a boy could lead to being yanked out of school. And many of the girls were the first in their families to attend university.
“I knew that if word got back to my parents that I was hanging out with some boy or talking to him, my education would be stopped,” says Nighat. And so, on some nights, she would sit before the computer—which had been placed in her room—and her fingertips would hover over the smooth black squares of the keyboard as she waited to hear a dial tone, a whistle, a crackle and the staticky whine that let her know she was close, a few tries on a patchy connection away from being anyone she wanted to be. A woman with a made-up name who was free to be any ASL (age/sex/location). “When you heard that sound, when the connection was made, just like that, life would feel exciting,” she remembers.
One night, some time after midnight or 1 a.m., she was in her room sitting at the computer, with her back towards the door. The lights were switched off and the door was unlocked. She was not allowed to lock the door to her room as her family didn’t believe there was anything you needed to be doing in your room that warranted keeping others out. She logged on and opened up a chat window. She was curious about who was out there, and on that night, like other nights, the chat was a tepid interaction with someone halfway across the world. “Who are you?” she asked. “What do you do?” The conversation might last a few minutes before she moved on to someone else, or the person she was chatting with realised that she wasn’t interested in anything more exciting than finding out the mundane realities of their life.
But that night she was not alone. There was someone else, standing quietly in the dark behind her. He watched her face, suffused with light from the screen, and saw her eagerly respond to someone on the other side. Nighat’s elder brother, the breadwinner in the family, whom she had had to ask for permission to go to university—“What sense does it make for you to study the law?” he had asked, and then relented on condition that she went to classes wearing a niqab to cover her face and body—was standing behind her and reading the messages she was exchanging with a total stranger. Where had she even met this man?
Her brother exploded. “You have rubbed any respect we had in the dirt,” he screamed. He slapped her. Her mother woke up and rushed into the room to find Nighat sobbing and pleading, “But what have I done?” Her brother was so upset, he started crying. Nighat’s mother had no idea what was going on, but she realised the girl had done something that could bring shame on the family. She too hit her.
“From tomorrow, she will not go to university,” Nighat’s brother announced, his face wet with tears. “She’s busy having affairs there.” The next morning the computer was taken from her room. In the end she was allowed to attend classes, but she never used an online chat room again.
Nighat was born in Ratta Matta, a town of 30,000 to 40,000 people near Jhang in Punjab. Her parents, Mehar Allah and Nasreen, had also been born and raised there, like their parents before them. They were sharecroppers. After each harvest they would retain a small share of the crops they produced; the rest went to their landlord. They were almost illiterate; Nasreen had only ever read the Quran.
Some time in the 1960s, Mehar Allah went to Karachi. He was the first person in his family to leave the village for the city. He landed a job as a daily-wage labourer, hauling bricks and shovelling endless mounds of sand on to the site of a new building for a bank. It was hard work, and he missed his wife and children. Every day an army of labourers like himself worked round the clock as the creamy white tower, round as a stack of coins and ridged like a car tyre, rose against the city’s skyline.
Once the building was completed, he was employed as a peon in a family-run textile business. Soon it was discovered that he had an excellent head for numbers, and moreover he was honest. He taught himself to write Urdu and worked his way up to clerk, poring over his employer’s books. By the time Nighat was born in 1979, Mehar Allah had moved his family to the city, and in the 1980s he became a partner in the business.
He was determined that his children be educated and enrolled them in an English-speaking private school. “We went to a wonderful school called Little Foxes,” Nighat says. She pauses. She realises that she has reverted to her childhood pronunciation of the school name, the name she and her sisters used when they had not yet learned to speak English. “Did I say ‘Little Foxes’? I meant Little Folks.”
The children were competitive and tried to get the best grades. They signed up for as many extracurricular activities as they could and took part in singing competitions. They were good singers—they got that from Mehar Allah, who could carry a tune and loved Siraiki poetry—their voices trained from years of performing and listening to wedding songs and hymns in Ratta Matta. Mehar Allah could never remember which grade any of his six children were in, but he attended the ceremony at the end of the year when they were awarded first, second or third place in their respective classes.
By the mid-1990s, Mehar Allah had started his own business, producing fibre canes, and had set up a factory in Lahore. He brought his nephews from Ratta Matta to the city and into the business so they did not have to herd goats and sheep for the rest of their lives. Mehar Allah also bought the land that his parents had tended and gave them their own home. For the first time their crops were entirely their own. But then Mehar Allah became very ill. He had always been a hard worker and had not taken care of himself. He suffered from diabetes and later temporary paralysis. The energy that had brought him from Ratta Matta to one of the richest cities in the country suddenly failed him. As he grew sicker, he wanted to be at home with his parents. He wanted to go back to the village.
It was decided that Nighat’s elder brother would handle what was left of the business in Lahore, and Nighat went to live with her sister, who was married. Money was tight, so there could be no more private education, and she was enrolled in a government secondary school. It was a culture shock. The system was completely different to what she was used to: everything was taught in Urdu, including mathematics and science. She struggled to understand her teachers and did badly, often barely scraping through to the next grade. When the time came to apply to university, she realised she wanted to study English literature, but her grades were not good enough. On a whim, she decided to apply to the University of Punjab to study law. To her surprise, she was accepted.
By this time Nighat’s brother, only four years older than her, was supporting the family. Mehar Allah and Nasreen would sometimes send their children gifts of flour, ghee or spinach from the village, but they could not pay for their education. Nighat’s brother was more conservative than his father. Even though Mehar Allah had enrolled his girls in schools where they sat in classrooms with boys, his sister would not go to a co-educational university, he said. “My brother was paying for everything now and he held all the power in the family,” Nighat says. “Everyone was dependent on him, and I needed his permission if I wanted to go to university.” Initially, she had not been that keen on studying law, but the moment she was told that he did not want her to do so, she dug her heels in.
She refused to wear a full veil as her brother wanted her to. She would only agree to wear an abaya, a long, full-sleeved gown, and a scarf to cover her head. When I ask why she didn’t just say she would wear a niqab to classes, and then remove it—after all, how would her brother know?—she looks surprised. The idea never occurred to her. “Why would I lie about it?” she asks. “I wanted to show them who I was. I knew that whatever I did would set an example for the other women in my family. I was the first one to go to university and study law—none of the men had ever done that.”
In Ratta Matta, Mehar Allah’s friends and relatives criticized him. Why are you sending your daughter to a university where she will study with boys? they asked. Why does she even need to study law? But Mehar Allah had heard them boasting when their sons had come back to the village with a law degree, and had seen these boys throw their weight around because they now had a power that few in the village did: they knew their rights. Mehar Allah wanted to tell them all, My girl is also a lawyer. Three years later, he got his wish.
Nighat was twenty-four years old and a fresh graduate when her father received a marriage proposal for her from a friend. “The boy’s family said they wanted to send me abroad to keep studying,” Nighat recalls. “They wanted me to become a barrister.” She didn’t particularly like her suitor, but she had nothing to compare him to: she had never been on a date, and she did not dream of her wedding day like many of the girls she knew. Her father suggested that she get to know the boy, and he was given permission to call the landline at their home and talk to her. For six months they would have stilted conversations while Nighat’s family members sat within earshot. They were allowed to meet only two times, even when they were engaged.
“It’s difficult to talk to you like this,” her fiancé complained. “I want to buy you a mobile phone.” But Nighat was not allowed to have her own phone. It was the early 2000s, and only about 5 percent of Pakistan’s population of 144 million owned a mobile; they were a status symbol.5 Moreover, Nighat had only seen a mobile phone in the hands of men. However, she agreed, and hid the phone from her family, only using it to speak to her fiancé.
One day as she sat with her family there was an unfamiliar buzzing sound. It was coming from Nighat’s bag. Her brother pounced, reached inside and pulled out the mobile phone. She had forgotten to turn off the ringer. Once again he told her she had brought shame on the family. She could not be trusted. She was not a good girl. Even today her voice is low and small, as though she is telling me a terrible secret about herself, when she recalls what he said to her that day. “I remember thinking, what is the big deal? What have I done that is so terrible? I’m only talking to my fiancé, and if he has a mobile phone, why can’t I?”
She was married soon after. The promises about going abroad for her education had been empty. Her husband and in-laws told her she was not allowed to work. After all, what kind of woman would want to go to the courts and wait around for hours while strange men gawked at her? She whiled away her days watching TV in her cramped new home with her in-laws, cooking and cleaning. There was no computer and no need for a mobile any more now that the man she had been talking to on the phone was her husband.
When she was in her third year at university, some friends had talked to her about sex. She could not believe what they were saying. She told them they were lying. No one in her family had ever mentioned this to her and she had not used her precious time online to look up things like that. “It just didn’t cross my mind,” she explains. “I wasn’t curious about it. I thought that you got pregnant by kissing.” She insisted to her friends, It’s the kiss. That’s what does it. They laughed at her when she made a disgusted face and said she never wanted to get married. But now, a few months after the wedding, she found herself pregnant.
While her husband and in-laws were thrilled, she had never been more unhappy in her life. “I lived in a small room with my husband, I cooked and I mopped the floors,” she says. “That was my life. I had no other purpose.” One night at 2 a.m., a month after her baby was born, she woke to the sound of her husband’s mobile phone ringing. He was fast asleep. She answered it. There was a woman on the line. “All my frustration from that past year just exploded,” she recalls.
She woke her husband up and told him she was done with him. He was furious and, while tussling with her, tried to choke their baby boy. “I’m going to kill you,” he shouted at her. “You are a bad woman. You have a terrible character.”
In the morning Nighat’s father came to the house. “If she stays here, I’ll kill myself,” her husband threatened.
“In that case I would have liked to leave her here, just to see that,” Nighat’s father said, picking up her bags. Holding her baby in her arms, she followed her father out of the house. It took her four years to get legal custody of her son, Abdullah, who goes by the name Bullah.
Back at her home, the family had gathered. They wept when they heard about what had happened, mortified that she would be a divorcée. Her aunts and uncles urged her to remain in iddat—the Islamically mandated forty days of seclusion for a widow or a divorcée. Her father asked everyone to leave. “There will be no such thing,” he announced. The next morning, when he saw her, he asked, “What are you doing sitting at home? Get up, get out and find yourself a job.” She went to the court and applied for her licence. She could finally practice law.
In court she would stand up to argue points only to have judges snap at her to sit down. She learned how women were treated in a system where, even as recently as 2016, only 5.8 percent of judges in the higher courts were women.6 While she waited for hours for her cases to be heard, she saw how mothers were treated when they were allowed to meet the children who had been taken from them—weeping in the corridors outside the courtrooms as clerks, peons and lawyers stepped around them as they sat on the floor with nowhere to be alone with their babies. “I would look at these women and think, I’m a lawyer and I’m getting knocked out by this system. What are these women going through?”
Around this time she was employed by the law minister to manage his office in Lahore. The job was perfect in many ways. Her boss was usually busy in Islamabad and frequently appeared on television in religious programmes. He rarely had time to be in Lahore, and so Nighat could run the office as she pleased. But the best thing about the job was that she had her own computer and access to the Internet for the first time in her life.
She used the three years she managed this office to research and finish a course in Internet governance. By this time, 2007, 3.5 million Pakistanis had access to the Internet, and Nighat was interested in the ways these people, especially women, were using the World Wide Web. Who had the right to be online and who determined access to the Internet?
One day two women friends visited her at work. They were being harassed by men on the site Orkut, a social media that was popular among Pakistanis at the time. Is there any law against this kind of behaviour? they wanted to know. Should we just shut down our accounts or is there something we can do? Nighat didn’t have an answer for them, so she started researching cyber harassment and looking into the laws governing Internet use in Pakistan. She helped her friends secure their accounts, boosting their privacy settings to avoid unwanted attention. They in turn told their friends about her.
One day Nighat’s boss was in Lahore for the taping of the religious show that he hosted. He came to the office when he was done, and she brought some case files into his room, where he was sitting at his desk.
He looked at her for a while. “You’ve got a bit fat,” he commented.
Nighat was taken aback. She stammered, “Yes, I suppose, a little bit.”
“Come here.” He beckoned to her. “Come sit on my lap. Let’s see just how heavy you have become.”
She stared at him. He repeated himself. “Come sit.”
Nighat apologized and got up to leave.
“What did I just tell you to do?” he snapped.
A wave of fury rushed through her. “You should be grateful I didn’t slap you for that.”
Her boss sighed. “You should consider yourself lucky. I asked you nicely.”
As Nighat was walking out, she heard him call out, “The other women lawyers do it for 500 rupees.”
Nighat learned about a rights organization based in Lahore called Bytes for All, which focused on digital security, freedom of expression and gender-based violence online, among other issues. She applied for a job there, and was soon working with the organization tackling online harassment. She learned that since 2007 the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority had been spying on Internet and mobile phone users by using a technology that enabled it to read content in real time. Journalists, bloggers, rights activists and citizen journalists were at risk of being monitored, and many websites such as Blogspot or media platforms like YouTube were censored or blocked in the name of national security, religion or morality.7 She began lobbying the government for comprehensive cybercrime legislation.
In 2012 Nighat began working as a consultant for UN Women. She frequently conducted digital security training for organizations and media groups, and a friend suggested that she set up an outfit devoted to this work. In October of that year, the friend purchased a domain for her. The Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) came into being, and Nighat would work at UN Women during the day and then spend her evenings working on her own organization’s website. She wrote blogs and slowly spread the word about her work. It would be two years before she received any funding for this work.
DRF’s first campaign was called Hamara Internet (Our Internet). The project was very close to Nighat’s heart. In a country like Pakistan, where male users dominate online space, often outnumbering female users one and a half times, she observed how misogynistic tendencies slowly crept from the offline arena into online space. “It wasn’t just about women facing harassment or threats online,” she explains; many women were afraid to be vocal or to express themselves online, just as they were in the offline world. “Women were facing behaviour online that had a very deep connection to the offline space.”
The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), tasked with handling cybercrime in the country, reported that it received more than 3,000 cases between 2014 and 2015—with 45 percent of the cases related to harassment of women on social media platforms like Facebook.8 In Punjab alone, where DRF is based, there were 170 complaints of cybercrimes against women in 2014.9 However, not a single case was successfully prosecuted, and many women ended up reaching a compromise with the person they had lodged a complaint against. With little faith in the government agency’s ability to handle a case, many women either choose to stop using the Internet or just keep quiet.
“[We want to] open up a new chapter in the struggle for women’s rights in Pakistan by addressing the one element that many campaigns previously ignored,” stated Hamara Internet’s manifesto. “The Internet.” The DRF team travelled to seventeen universities and colleges across Pakistan and trained more than 1,800 female students and teachers to protect themselves online. They taught girls how to lock their phones and create secure passwords. Girls told stories of being shamed off the Internet when fake profiles with their names or faces were created and used to send friends and family members explicit messages or vulgar photos; they received threats of rape and murder; they were stalked; their photos were copied without their consent, and their faces Photoshopped onto the naked bodies of other women.
In the first ever comprehensive survey of Pakistani women’s experiences online, the DRF team learned that only 28 percent of the women they met as part of the Hamara Internet campaign knew about laws against cyber harassment. 70 percent of these women were afraid to post pictures of themselves online because they feared they could be misused. They were afraid to report harassment because it could tarnish their names or reputation or put them in danger. Many were forced to hand over passwords to phones, email accounts, messaging services and social media accounts to their partners or the male members of their families so that they could be routinely checked on.
As the DRF training sessions continued, Nighat started to hear from girls who had attended them. The messages would arrive late at night on her personal Facebook account and the Hamara Internet account. They were desperate. “If you don’t reply to me in an hour, I’m going to kill myself,” one girl said. These girls were being blackmailed, harassed or threatened online, and they did not know who to turn to. Often Nighat used her contacts in the tech world or within social media companies to try to resolve problems. She would also speak to the girls for days, counselling them or providing emotional support.
Other times, however, she had to be inventive with solutions. “Once I received a message from a woman in Ireland who told me that a man in Pakistan, whom she had had a relationship with, was harassing and blackmailing her,” she recalls. The two had been in a relationship for two or three years, and had exchanged photographs and videos. When the woman ended the affair, the man threatened to send her pictures to her parents and the priest at her church. Nighat contacted the FIA and explained what was happening, but they said they could not deal with an international complaint. The woman’s only hope was to contact the Pakistani embassy in Ireland and ask them for help. When Nighat told her this, the woman threatened to kill herself. She was from a conservative Catholic family, and her family had no idea she had been in a relationship.
Nighat asked for the man’s phone number. He lived in Rawalpindi. She took a deep breath and called him. “I spoke in English, with an accent,” Nighat recalls. “I knew Pakistanis get impressed by that sort of stuff. I told him I was his ex-girlfriend’s lawyer. I gave him details about where he lived, his job and so on, and said he was being observed. The next time he contacted the woman, the FIA would initiate a case against him. I knew all the relevant laws against this sort of thing and quoted them to scare him.”
The man was terrified. He said he did not know there was a law against what he was doing.
“You might not have known about the law, but didn’t you realise you were harassing this woman?” Nighat asked him angrily. He never contacted his ex-girlfriend again.
By 2016 she was feeling overwhelmed by requests for help from strangers. In many instances she was battling a legal system that did not support the women who approached her or understand the trauma caused by the harassment.
“I was contacted by a young woman a year ago who had received an offer of marriage from her brother-in-law,” Nighat recalls. “He wanted her to be his second wife. The girl refused, and the man threw acid on her face. She fought a case against him, and he was jailed, but his cousins then began to blackmail her. They stole photographs of her and threatened to release doctored images online and among her family. She needed me to help stop them from doing so.”
Nighat approached the police, but was rebuffed. “This woman was attacked with acid and you want us to focus on the theft of pictures?”
I meet the deputy director of the Federal Investigation Agency’s cybercrime wing, Noman Bodla, on a bitterly cold morning at the Islamabad office of the National Response Center for Cyber Crime (NR3C), which was established by the federal government in 2007 to curb “technological abuse.” There are five such cybercrime units across the country and that headed by Bodla has jurisdiction over Jhelum (at the northern edge of the Punjab province), Islamabad, Rawalpindi, parts of Kashmir, and Gilgit Baltistan. It is raining, and the unpaved road leading to the building has turned to mud. After visitors squelch past the concrete barricades, they must provide their names and national identity card numbers to a guard sitting in a small cabin, who notes down the details in a register. The black-tiled NR3C building has sand-coloured arches and small curved balconies. All the windows have been treated to mirror the world back on itself—today, shining slices of the grey sky. A guard stands at the entrance under an awning painted with a verse from the Quran: “Allah gives to those whom He wants.”
The building is old and there are no elevators. Inside it is dark, with the only light coming from windows on each stairwell and bare bulbs in the narrow corridors. The ninety-nine names of Allah shadow all who walk through the corridors here, painted in blue as close to the ceiling as possible: the Omnipotent One, the Guarding One, the Dominant One, the Creator, the Reckoning One, the Watchful One. In Bodla’s small office space, mostly taken up by a desk, a whiteboard the size of half a newspaper page has been mounted on the wall. On it a reminder is written in neat capital letters: HARD WORK BEATS TALENT WHEN TALENT DOESN’T WORK HARD.
Bodla had been in his position for a month when he realised that he was battling a force that he had never expected to go up against: Hollywood. “The movies have ruined things for us,” he explains. “Everyone thinks we are macho men and we can do anything. They watch films where someone sits at a computer and with the press of a button, suddenly has access to all information. It’s nothing like that.” Bodla has received requests to recover stolen mobile phones and laptops, trace phone numbers and find children who have run away from home. “The complainant said that his daughter, who had run away, was on Facebook, and so he needed the cybercrime wing to locate her. Something could happen to them in a dream and they think they need to call us,” he grumbles.
When the complaints are more suited to his job description—for instance, in cases of cyberstalking, online threats or abuse, or the misuse or theft of personal information online—most people expect a few quick taps on a keyboard will solve their problem. Bodla, who is in his late thirties, says that he was one of the country’s first experts in the field of cybercrime. “I was studying all of this back in 2005 or 2006, when no one even knew about cybercrimes,” he brags. As a digital forensics expert, his opinion is admissible in court, and he lectures law enforcement trainees and members of the judiciary about cybercrime.
Once a complaint is received at the NR3C in Islamabad—either through an online form, an email, a handwritten note or a call to head-quarters—the complainant is asked to visit one of the five units with proof of any harassment or cybercrime. If the complainant does not live in a city with an NR3C office (located in Islamabad, Peshawar, Lahore, Karachi, and Quetta), they must travel to one of these cities.
Here their complaint is recorded and their name noted—there is no anonymity. All evidence of the crime, including screenshots, messages, photographs, or videos, must be provided to the officer dealing with the complaint. The material is not returned to the complainant but is filed away, along with thousands of other photographs and printouts, at the NR3C offices.
Once a formal inquiry is launched and the FIA has a warrant, officials can search and seize items such as laptops or mobile phones from the suspect’s home. Sometimes a court order is sent to social media companies such as Facebook to request details about the suspect. “If we get those details—and that’s a big if—then we are able to get an IP address and the suspect’s name and location,” Bodla explains.
Any evidence gathered in searches is sent to a forensic lab so that incriminating data may be extracted from it. Once the FIA believes it has sufficient evidence, it creates a report for its legal team, who see if there are grounds to prosecute. The legal team then recommends whether an FIR (First Information Report), the first step for a police investigation, can be registered. With the approval of the court and the director of the cybercrime wing—unless the complaint concerns nudity, child pornography or cyber terrorism, in which case the NR3C does not need to wait for the court’s approval—an FIR is registered and the suspect may be arrested. “Normally, this process doesn’t take too long,” Bodla explains. “The complaint should be converted into an inquiry or the case closed within one month.”
But there are exceptions. The suspect can be in another country. Don’t forget that even “someone in Panama can cause so many problems for people here in Islamabad,” Bodla says with a giggle, referring to a corruption probe against the prime minister after the Panama Papers were leaked, in which case the complaint is out of the FIA’s jurisdiction. “In those cases the complainant has two options. Either live with it or wait for somebody to do the same thing from within the country.” Even if the suspect is in another city, the complainant may have to wait while their case is turned over to the relevant NR3C office or until the local officials travel to the city the suspect resides in to further investigate.
As companies like Google or Facebook are not legally compelled to provide information to the Pakistani government, many complainants can only hope that they will cooperate by providing information about a suspect’s IP address or by taking down photographs or messages that could put lives at risk, reveal hidden identities to the public, or cause distress.
In April 2017 Facebook revealed that the Pakistani government made 1,002 requests for data on the social media platform’s Pakistani users in the second half of 2016—a steady increase since 2013, when the social media platform received only thirty-five requests for user data. According to the company’s published policies, Facebook may “access, preserve and share your information in response to a legal request (like a search warrant, court order or subpoena)” if there is “belief that the law requires us to do so.” Since 2015, Facebook has complied with 64 percent to 68 percent of these requests.10
In 2017, the Pakistani government appeared to be primarily concerned with the data of social media accounts that shared material deemed to be blasphemous, and it lobbied Facebook and Twitter to make it easier to track and locate users who had allegedly committed blasphemy online. In June an anti-terrorism court sentenced a man to death for reportedly making derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad and his wives on Facebook—the first case of digitally perpetrated blasphemy in the country.11
While Bodla insists that the NR3C does not deviate from procedure when it comes to tracking suspects, a report in June 2017 by the Guardian revealed that the FIA detained social media users, including activists, journalists and a political party worker, for posting “anti-military” content online.12 An FIA official who chose to remain anonymous told the reporter his agency could “interrogate and seize laptops and phones without warrant” and added, “We are authorized to detain anyone, just on suspicion.”13
In other cases, however, the FIA has reportedly been unable to help complainants with relatively simple requests. In March 2017 a senator revealed that two fake accounts under his name were being run on Twitter, and despite letters to the FIA, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and the Intelligence Bureau, he had been unable to have the accounts shut down. “I was told that only Twitter administration could do that,” Senator Raza Rabbani said during a session in the Senate.
Bodla estimates that in 2016 his office received roughly 2,500 complaints of cybercrimes. Of those, around 166 or 167 went on to reach the inquiry stage. And 61 of those cases led to the registration of an FIR. Many complainants choose not to pursue their case because they are unable to go through such a lengthy procedure, particularly if they do not live in a city with an NR3C office—in this case they must make repeated trips to the nearest office while their case continues. “Sometimes people back out of the complaint because they fear for their reputation or they feel social pressure to let it go,” Bodla says. Between 2016 and 2017, some of the complaints resolved by the NR3C included instances of vulgar messages, the non-consensual use of photographs, publication of “objectionable content” and the creation of fake profiles. In March 2017 a woman was arrested for the first time for blackmail via social media.
When I ask Bodla what happens to complainants who are unable to bear the cost of travel to the nearest NR3C office, he admits that more cybercrime centres are needed, particularly for those who do not live in major cities. He says his office has requested the creation of fifteen more centres, in cities like Multan, Sukkur, and Gwadar. There has been no word on whether the request has been approved. He is irritated when asked about women or minors who may not have permission to travel to another city alone and who do not want to confide in their family about being harassed or targeted online. “The people who have those kinds of problems don’t even come to us,” he says. “I can’t speak for them.”
In the Hamara Internet survey, Nighat’s organization learned that 15 percent of the 1,800 women surveyed in schools and colleges across Pakistan had reported a case of harassment to the FIA. Only 11 percent of these said they believed making a complaint to the NR3C would help. Some 53 percent of the women who had filed a complaint said the agency wasn’t helpful at all.
Bodla says the only way to stay safe online is to follow two golden rules: never ever upload or share any pictures or messages, and remember that anything you share can never be deleted. When I ask how he intends to have a generation of Pakistanis plugged into Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and WhatsApp follow those rules, he admits that there is a need for “R and D” (research and development).
There are fifteen people, including five investigators, currently working under Bodla. Only one is a woman. The NR3C is required to have her present during raids, in case they encounter women in the suspect’s home or need to arrest a female suspect. A male officer is more likely to deal with complainants, including women who need to report vulgar messages, doctored photographs, or intimate pictures, videos or messages shared without their consent. While organizations like DRF have called on the FIA to consider cultural norms in a place like Pakistan and have more women in the NR3C handle complaints, Bodla says that is not possible. “I have five investigators, and even if I wanted to address complaints to my female employee, she cannot handle all of them,” he explains. When a woman calls the NR3C helpline, she cannot choose to speak with a male or a female officer—she must talk to whoever happens to answer her call. If the complainant withholds some material or the NR3C believes there isn’t sufficient evidence, the case is not taken forward. Even if there were more female employees in the NR3C, Bodla argues, it wouldn’t make any difference – after all, a complainant has to be prepared for any photographs, messages or videos to be seen in court if needed. “The complainants have to be aware that everything—nude pictures, videos or whatever—has to be on the record and perused in court. If they’re not willing to do that, there’s no case.
“I don’t know why you think this is so extraordinary,” Bodla says curtly. “If a woman was raped, would she bother going to a female police station? Normally men are sitting at the station, and they do the investigation. So what’s the problem?” Those who say the NR3C needs more female officers are simply biased, he argues, and has a theory about such critics. “It’s because there’s a higher class of society involved in cybercrimes.” He laughs. “The lower class would not be involved in using this Facebook stuff. They would bother about having enough food, not about using the Facebook for their friendships. The ones using Facebook or WhatsApp are the class that uses the Internet for their leisure time. And which class is able to have leisure time and access to all these fancy things? So that’s why you think they should be treated in an extraordinary way?”
On my way out of Bodla’s office I pass a man sitting on a wooden chair with a ripped seat by one of the windows in the hall. He has thrown open the window and dangles his feet outside. He’s listening to the latest Bollywood hits on his mobile phone while scrolling endlessly through some social media feed. The music echoes through the corridor, which is lined with shelves crammed with papers. There are expense reports, budget notes, documents with the stamp of the director’s office, and hundreds of brown folders, stacked as tall as a man, bound together with twine and bursting with sheets of paper, yellowing at the edges, some ripped or nibbled away by termites, so long have they been there.
In August 2016 the government passed the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), a piece of legislation criticized by opposition parties and rights activists as a tool to curb freedom of expression. The law includes punishment for hate speech and recruitment or planning of terrorist acts through online platforms (imprisonment for up to seven years and/or a fine), the dissemination of child pornography (imprisonment for up to seven years and/or a fine of up to 5 million rupees), cyberstalking, intimidation, harassment, or the non-consensual distribution of photographs or videos (imprisonment for up to three years and/or a fine of up to one million rupees), sexually explicit doctored photographs or videos and blackmail for sexual acts (imprisonment for up to five years and/or a fine of up to five million rupees), and the use of another’s identity without permission (imprisonment for up to three years and/or a fine of up to five million rupees).
However, critics of the law, including Nighat, say the language of the act is vague and open to abuse. The section dealing with “spoofing,” for example, would make it an offence to caricature or parody political leaders—this includes memes—resulting in imprisonment for up to three years and/or a fine of 500,000 rupees. Section 10, dealing with hate speech, warns against information shared online that “is likely to advance inter-faith, sectarian or racial hatred” but does not consider that material shared by religious minorities may offend those in a majority. In September 2016, a month after the act was passed, a Christian man named Nabeel Masih was arrested and charged with blasphemy for allegedly sharing a photograph of the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site, on social media.14
While the section dealing with cyberstalking could help victims of harassment, it could also implicate citizen journalists who use social media to share videos or photos of wrongdoing or harmful behaviour. The act gives the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority the power to remove or block access to any content online “if it considers it necessary in the interest of the glory of Islam or the integrity, security or defence of Pakistan…public order, decency or morality.”15
State Minister for Information Technology Anusha Rahman said in 2016 that the act could not be changed “on the whims and wishes of a few NGOs,” and she dismissed critics as having an agenda against the government. “Every day, dozens of complaints are launched by those who are targeted online,” she argued in the National Assembly. “And there have been cases where young girls have committed suicide, therefore, the government cannot let all this happen just like that.” The matter was not up for discussion. PECA, its supporters insisted, was there to protect the daughters of Pakistan. And were it not for the body of a young woman, found hanging in her room at one of Sindh’s largest universities four months after the legislation was passed, it would have been at least possible to believe this.
On 31 December 2016, a few days before classes resumed at the University of Sindh in Jamshoro, a twenty-two-year-old postgraduate student named Naila returned to the campus. She had travelled there from her home in Qambar, about 300 kilometres away. At the time only a handful of girls were at the hostel where Naila lived. The warden, one of five students charged with watching over the hostel’s residents, was curious about why Naila had returned from vacation early. Naila said she was worried about her thesis, which was due soon, and wanted to have some quiet time to work on it. A student at the university’s Institute of Sindhology, Naila was writing about the romantic poetry of the Sufi scholar Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai.
Marvi Hostel is home to 1,600 girls who live there for a paltry 3,500 rupees a year. They come to the university from towns and villages across the province and some also from homes in provinces abutting Sindh. Every year the university receives a flood of requests for accommodation. It is the only hostel for undergraduate and postgraduate girls on campus, and although enrolment has increased from 16,000 to 32,000 students in the last decade, no new hostels have been built to accommodate the growing numbers. There are up to 8,000 girls at the University of Sindh, and for many a place at Marvi Hostel is the only way they will be allowed to leave their homes for university. One official at the hostel estimated that sixty girls were often crammed into a space built to house thirty. Beds are squeezed in a few inches apart, and many girls share a single bed with friends.
Some time after 8 p.m. on the day she came back to the hostel Naila told the warden she wasn’t feeling well. She wanted to see a doctor. It was past the time that girls were allowed to leave the premises alone, and if someone was ill, the warden had to accompany them. The warden told Naila that she would call a car and go with her to a doctor. Naila changed her mind. I’m just feeling a bit weak, she reportedly said. Perhaps I should order some food. Two burgers were delivered to the hostel. The police found the boxes in the dustbin outside Naila’s room the next day, along with two empty strips of sleeping pills. The warden told four or five girls on Naila’s floor to keep an eye on her, as she wasn’t feeling well. The girls invited her to stay in their room, but Naila refused. She said she was fine.
When the warden did her rounds the following day, there was no answer from Naila’s door. She thought she might be sleeping and tried to open the door. It was locked. The rooms on this floor all have a narrow window, almost level with the top of the door, and the warden pushed her hand through the bars of the window and pulled the curtain to one side. She stood on the tips of her toes and peered in. The room was dimly lit. The curtains of the other window were closed. She couldn’t see Naila on her bed. Then she noticed the slightest movement, a gentle swaying in the centre of the room—a body hanging from the fan.
By the time the warden reached the provost’s home, located on the other side of the hostel’s grounds, she was panting and sobbing. She could barely speak. She kept clutching at her neck. She drank some water and then blurted, “A girl is hanging in the room.”
A police officer was summoned. It took him two or three tries to break open the door. It had been locked from the inside with a deadbolt at the top. There was no other way into the room. The only other window opened on to a sheer drop to the ground.
The officer untied the blue and pink dupatta knotted around Naila’s neck and lowered her body on to the bed below. A chair had been kicked to the side. The top button of Naila’s black shirt, embroidered with hot-pink flowers at the neck, had been wrenched off. Her thesis was on the desk, along with her phone. There was no note. Naila’s phone had been wiped clean of all messages, photographs, videos, or notes.
While the police were searching the room, the phone rang. When one of the officials answered it, there was only silence at the other end. The caller hung up and then quickly sent a text message: “Sorry, wrong number.” But the number had been saved in the phone along with the name of the caller: Anis Khaskheli. The police would find that number frequently on Naila’s call records over the last three months. “When we went to arrest [Khaskheli], he told us, ‘I knew you would come for me,’ ” said Khadim Rind of the Hyderabad police at a press conference a week later. “‘I was waiting for you.’ ”
Khaskheli was a lecturer at a school nearby. He had befriended Naila on Facebook a few months ago. “You will be amazed to know that this is a murder,” Rind said sombrely at the start of the press conference. “Khaskheli trapped Naila for three months. He did it very, very slowly. He spoke to her about love and told her he wanted to marry her. And then, when Naila said she was going to be done with her Master’s and this was the time to marry, he refused.” Naila, the police said, was not the only girl Anis was talking to at the time. “There are thirty other girls that we know of,” Rind said. “Anis took nude pictures of them and he would blackmail them to get more pictures.” The data recovered from Anis’s phone was still being decoded. There could be more girls, Rind warned.
At the hostel the news was met with disbelief. Photographs of Naila, particularly one in which she is clutching a large mobile phone, were shared on Facebook among the students, along with tributes from friends and classmates. She was a pretty girl with a round face and a penchant for doing her hair in a beehive. She was “modern.” She wore short kameezes, jeans and heels. She streaked her hair and dyed it for her brother’s wedding. She liked to be fashionable. She was intelligent and had won awards for her work at the university. She loved Bhittai’s verses and could rattle off his poems. Some of the girls refused to believe she could have been in a relationship with Anis. She may have killed herself because she was anxious about her thesis, they said. But those who have seen the thesis agree that it was well written and as good as any of Naila’s other work.
Someone leaked a video of the police officer breaking into her room. In the video she is visible hanging from the ceiling.
Then the rumours started. Naila would share romantic poetry on her Facebook page and tag her professor in the posts. What kind of girl does that? Her family was uneducated and conservative. They wanted to marry her off as soon as she was done with university. She had pleaded with the hostel warden to help her find a job, so she did not have to return to Qambar. She killed herself because her family had insisted on an arranged marriage. But, as some girls pointed out, if her family was so conservative, would they really have sent their daughter to university in another city?
“She was proudy,” one hostel official said. A haughty girl who wanted to be independent and shut the door in the warden’s face when she suggested she might like to stay in a room with some of the other girls instead of sleeping alone on that last night. She killed herself when Anis, a “hanky panky playboy type guy,” threatened to share her photos with others because “that would have ruined the image she had built of herself at the hostel.”
There was gossip that Naila had four or five more SIMs in her purse, that she was one of those girls who didn’t have just one boyfriend, but three or four. At the hostel some alleged these girls were “running a business.” A bus ticket found in her room revealed that Naila had left her home in Qambar on the twenty-seventh, but arrived at the hostel on the thirty-first. Where had she been during those three days?
The rumours persisted. Naila had given the hostel officials an incorrect phone number for her parents, so they could not be contacted if she stayed out too late or did something against the rules. Some even said she was pregnant.
Deputy Inspector General Khadim Rind insisted that all photographs, videos and messages recovered from Naila and Anis’s phones had been strictly safeguarded. “No one has seen them, other than the superintendent and myself,” he said. “We used our own laptops to download the data and then we sat at home and made printouts of all of the communication.” But there were some on campus, including professors and the officials at Marvi Hostel, who said they had seen the pictures Khaskheli had. In many of them, one woman said, Naila was naked. She seemed to be unaware that she was being photographed.
The university has tightened security at the hostel since Naila’s death. The hostel provosts have created a network of “volunteers” who keep an eye on the girls. An old, unmanned gate into the hostel has been sealed. Any girl entering or leaving Marvi Hostel must now enter her details in a register at the gate and inform two women sitting there about where she is going. If she says she is going somewhere with her family, one of the provosts will wait outside the gate with her to see who picks her up. If a girl stays out past 9 p.m. she must write a letter apologizing to the hostel officials and her parents are contacted. “Many of these girls have left their villages or towns for the first time when they come here,” explains a deputy provost. “Their minds are so fresh. They need a positive environment so they can stay on the right path.”
But not everyone agrees that curbing the girls’ physical movement is the solution to the problem. “I don’t allow my daughters to even sit on a bike with their brother if they are leaving the house,” says the university’s vice chancellor, Dr Fateh Muhammed Burfat. “It’s not about what I feel—it’s the culture we live in. The person on the road has no idea that the boy you’re riding around on a bike with is your brother. That is the environment that a majority of our female students come from. But then they arrive at university and see girls talking to boys or sitting on benches with boys in the gardens. The rich sons of landlords follow the girls in their cars or chase them, or they throw pieces of paper with their phone numbers written on them into the girls’ laps. The girls have never experienced this. They can get confused.”
On Facebook groups that have been shut down and re-created several times under different names, students can post anonymous messages about girls or boys they are interested in and provide their phone number. One page, with more than 5,000 followers, is called Sindh University Crushes and Confessions. “Assalam-o-alaikum, dear admin, don’t show my name,” reads one message. “My confession: there’s a girl in the Physics department, I think she’s in the first year, and she was wearing a black outfit the other day. You were sitting in front of me in the last seminar. You were preparing for the exam and I couldn’t stop looking at you. You looked at me a few times. You must have understood by now who I am. Your eyes are beautiful. I like you. Please contact me.”
Marvi Hostel does not have Wi-Fi and the network in the university does not allow access to Facebook or WhatsApp. While only some of the students own their own laptops through government schemes or awards, almost all have mobile phones with a 3G connection. “I am not running a jail here,” says Dr Burfat. “I can’t take away their phones, but the most we can ask is that they turn off the ringer and not take calls after a certain time. But if a girl is lying in her bed at night and chatting with someone, how can we control that? Some of the girls are so secretive about their relationships, that even a friend sleeping next to her will have no idea she’s talking to a boy.” A common trick, girls at the hostel say, is to answer your phone with the words, “Yes, Mother?”
Dr Burfat says he has seen the pictures in Naila’s case. “You would not send such pictures to your parents, who you have known your whole life,” he says. “So why are you sending them to a man you have known for three months? The girls here need to understand that they should not do anything that would bring them shame. Today they are in the university, but tomorrow they will have to go back to their villages, right? University life is one thing, but life in the village and what is accepted there is completely different.”
The provosts at the hostel know the security system is not foolproof when it comes to keeping tabs on the students. “I can tell them when to leave and when to come back, and I can tell them when to be in their rooms, but once they turn on their phones, they could be anywhere they want to be,” a deputy provost says.
In 2016 DRF held a digital security training session at the university and also spoke to the female students about harassment and blackmail online. A month after Naila’s body was found, the university held another session: “Women protection and laws against women harassment.” A professor who was at the event said that only two hundred or so girls attended.
At the session Dr Burfat announced that a cell would be created at the university where girls could report any harassment. “I am like the father of all female faculty and students and will make sure that they stay safe and secure,” he told the students. One provost at the hostel was sceptical about the cell or any platform to report harassment or cybercrimes. “You need a lot of courage to approach someone and show them messages or pictures exchanged with your boyfriend,” she said. “Only a very bold girl, or a girl who isn’t worried about the news getting back to her family or being called a ‘bad girl,’ would come forward. For others, it will take time. We just aren’t there yet.”
Sindh Inspector General of Police A. D. Khowaja also spoke at the seminar. He advised female students not to write anything on social media or in a message that they could not show to their brothers or fathers. No one would dare to blackmail them if they followed this advice, he said.
Some officials at the university argue that only the girls can safeguard themselves. “Look at this,” exclaims a deputy provost at the hostel, waving her hand in the air. “Do you hear anything?” She claps her other palm to her hand. “Did you hear that?” She clasps both hands together and claps again. “Something can only exist when two people are involved.” She waves one hand in the air. “One on its own cannot do anything. And a woman—a good woman—is like a mountain. You cannot move her for anything. Until she shows some weakness, no man can touch her or send her an inappropriate message or anything.”
When the university re-opened in January, some of the girls were reluctant to return. They missed a few classes, but then slowly trickled back. Naila’s room is still sealed. She lived here with four other girls and not a single one has returned to the campus or answered calls from the university officials. Their belongings are still in the room and their education incomplete.
“In the beginning, the girls felt scared to be in Marvi Hostel,” says the senior provost, Aneela Soomro. “They would say they could hear voices coming from Naila’s room and the sound of weeping or footsteps late at night. Some of the more mischievous girls started knocking on doors after midnight or making sounds just to scare people. But now I have girls coming to me and asking to live in Naila’s room. It’s an empty room and we don’t have enough space as it is.”
As for what happened in that room on the night she died, the rumours and stories continue to be told, and in July Khaskheli was released from police custody on bail. The case continues, but not many at the university are hopeful that the outcome will help them understand what happened or how to keep female students safe online. “To take your life is a very big step,” a deputy provost says. “Why did she do it? Why was she so scared? Only Naila knows what happened. No one else can tell you.”
When I meet Nighat in Lahore in January 2017 the helpline has been active for close to a month. “I decided to start it up in the name of Allah,” Nighat explains. “I figured I would find the funding.” A few days after Qandeel’s murder, Nighat wrote a tribute and published it online. And then she received a message: a global fund to support activists at critical junctures wanted to give her $5,000. A few weeks later another group got in touch. They offered her $20,000. And in November she won the 2016 Human Rights Tulip award for her work as a digital rights activist. The prize money: more than $100,000. “And just like that, I had the money for the helpline,” Nighat says with a smile.
The helpline receives ninety-five calls in its first month. By the next month, the number has surged to 159 as word spreads. From Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., two women in their early twenties, Shmyla and Hira, answer the phones at the DRF office with a reassuring, “Assalam-o-alaikum, this is the cyber harassment helpline, how can I help you?”
The team received extensive training from a not-for-profit organization before the helpline became operational, and it has been a steep learning curve for Nighat. “I had this moment where I realised I’ve been doing things completely wrong,” she says. “When I told the trainer about some of the ways in which I had to tackle complaints in the past, she was horrified.” She made Nighat promise not to get “inventive” with solutions. It has not been easy to do so. “Initially, we had prepared a script with a psychiatrist and rehearsed it,” explains Shmyla. “We were determined to stick to it. It went out the window pretty quickly.”
The team does not ask for names or any identifying information, but callers usually quickly blurt everything out: real names, identity card numbers, the name of the school or college they study at and so on. They often insist, “I’m an educated person. I come from a good family.” They are scared they won’t be taken seriously. “They give us the information because they want to establish that they’re real,” Shmyla believes. “They want to tell us: I’m a real person. I’m not making this up.”
Many female callers are desperate to prove that they did not invite the harassment and want to send DRF screenshots or messages. Other callers are embarrassed and wanted to talk in hypotheticals. “What if my friend sent pictures to her boyfriend?” one might ask. Some people are suspicious. They do not understand what DRF does and if they are affiliated to the government or police. All the callers have one thing in common: they need the problem to go away immediately.
DRF’s job is to tell the callers about their rights when it comes to harassment and cybercrimes. They help them navigate the NR3C’s system and explain the procedure—including how long it will likely take the FIA to deal with their complaint—and offer emotional support throughout the process of dealing with NR3C officials. “We have to encourage the callers to use mechanisms that are already in place,” Nighat explains. “Only when those mechanisms are exhausted and the problem has not been solved do we try to fix it.” She hopes that as more and more complainants reach out to the NR3C, DRF will be able to receive feedback about problems with the government’s system, and then lobby for change. If callers do not want to deal with the NR3C or—particularly in the case of the LGBT or religious communities—are too scared to, Shmyla and Hira help them figure out a way to talk to friends or family members about the problem. In many cases, DRF speak to parents or siblings during a call as well.
There is one firm rule: no promises are made to callers and they are never told, “I’ll fix this for you.” In her first three weeks working at the helpline this took a toll on Shmyla. “My shoulders were always tense and I felt helpless all the time,” she says. “I was snapping at everyone at home and my friends had started to wonder what was going on with me. I wasn’t behaving like myself.” When she spoke to Nighat about this, Shmyla realised what the problem was. “I knew the callers wanted to hear, ‘Don’t worry,’ and I just couldn’t say this.”
One particular phone call is difficult to forget. “I picked up the phone and there was this girl sobbing,” Shmyla recalls. “She was hiding in her bathroom and calling me. She was younger than me. She told me, ‘I’m calling you as a last resort.’ She had been in a relationship with someone and he had photographs of her. He would tell her to send him more pictures, and if she would refuse, he would threaten to share the ones he had online. The demands would change. He would say, ‘I want you to come on Skype tonight. If you don’t, I’ll show the pictures to everyone.’ He knew where she lived and she was terrified that if she didn’t give him whatever he wanted, he would share the photos with her family.”
Shmyla told the caller she had enough evidence for a case. She knew where the boy lived and his real name. The girl needed to go to the NR3C. Shmyla tried to convince her to confide in her sister, and have her accompany her to the NR3C office. “I never found out what happened,” Shmyla says. The girl never called back. “At the end of the day, I have to treat this as another job,” Shmyla explains. “It’s very hard to do that, but I’m beginning to realise that I have to.”
She brings empathy into her interactions with callers as much as she can. She won’t promise them a solution, but she tries to reassure them by talking about other similar cases. She wants them to know they aren’t alone. She tells them what they are feeling is normal and they shouldn’t berate themselves. She breaks down the NR3C’s procedures and possible responses. It makes her feel useful when she can help build an evidence file for the NR3C, tell callers what steps to take and how long they can expect the FIA to take with their case.
One complainant who has stayed in touch with the DRF team has been dealing with the FIA for a year and travelling every month to the NR3C office in Lahore to pursue their complaint. As only a small fraction of callers are able to undertake that kind of journey, DRF is now considering creating a network of volunteers or lawyers across the country who can accompany women or minors to cities with an office. In May 2017 a news report claimed that the NR3C office in Lahore, where DRF is based, had yet to clear a backlog of 6,000 cases registered in six months.16 The office had only seven personnel, and some of them were not trained to handle complaints, with simple forensic analysis that could be completed in ten to fifteen minutes taking months, the report added.
“I had one case where the NR3C officials kept hinting that the complainant should drop the case,” Shmyla says. “They would say things like, ‘Evidence can be lost, you know.’ ” She encouraged the caller to insist on a formal complaint and then provide DRF with the details of the FIR so that they could see if the officials had worked up a strong enough case for prosecution.
The most commonly received complaints at the helpline are the creation of fake profiles, blackmail and the non-consensual sharing or manipulating of data such as phone numbers, photographs or personal information. In the overwhelming number of these cases, the complainant cannot afford to wait for weeks for the NR3C’s response.
One man called the helpline on his sisters’ behalf, in order to ask for help in taking down Photoshopped pictures and fake Facebook profiles that shared the girls’ phone numbers and promised callers “anything you like.” The girls’ family, from a small town in Punjab, was being ostracized as the news spread. “I understand that this is not their fault,” the man said. “But how many people am I supposed to explain that to?” The girls were unmarried. Who would want to marry them after this?
“We can tell those kinds of callers that we’ll provide them with emotional support and psychological help, but they don’t always want that,” Hira says. “When something is spreading like wildfire online, they don’t want to know how to cope with it—they just want the problem to go away. When I can’t help them with that, I begin to wonder, Are we even doing anything substantial? Will we ever be able to?” In such cases, or when a caller’s life is at risk or they cannot easily travel to another city with an NR3C office, DRF will tap into personal contacts and connections within the government, law enforcement agencies or NGOs and companies such as Facebook and attempt to have the material removed immediately.
Hira says such cases have made her realise that she is not completely happy that the helpline exists. “I’m more frustrated that there is even a need for something like this,” she explains. At such moments, the simpler cases—someone needs help to deactivate their social media page or change their password after their phone has been stolen, or they cannot read English and need help navigating Facebook’s privacy settings—are a relief; a quick shot of motivation to keep going.
Nighat still gets messages in her own inbox from women who are desperate for help, but these have slowly decreased to two or three a day. Now she no longer feels panicked if she is not constantly checking her phone. The DRF team has run extensive social media campaigns about the helpline, which has received local media coverage, and its number has been shared at every opportunity. Nighat has had time to pause and reflect on what else needs her attention. She even took her first vacation with her son recently, and when we Skyped, she looked happy and well rested. It was a brief respite from a job where her personal and public lives cannot help but seep in to one another—after all, she even lives at the DRF office, sharing two rooms on the first floor with her sister and son.
“The work is personal for me,” she explains. “With every achievement, I feel like everything that happened to me, all the bad stuff, all the struggles, are slowly erased from my memory. I tell other women about what happened to me. I’m not from a privileged background. My struggle is that of any ordinary woman here. Women like me fight battles on two fronts: one for others and one for ourselves. There were many times when I wanted to give up, when I wanted to leave this work and just do something else. But then when I get messages or hear from women who need my help, they bring me back to the work.”
Today, when Nighat reflects on her time at university and the days when she did not have permission to use a computer, she thinks of the room on the ground floor of her home where the walls are painted a cool deep green, and of the two women who wait for their phones to ring so they can help create a safer space online for anyone who wishes to be there. “I’m bringing up an army of women,” she says. “They may not have any background in this work and they may not know anything about digital rights. But I’m here to train them.”
In January 2017, after they found out about Naila, Nighat and Shmyla wrote a searing open letter to the minister for information technology, Anusha Rahman. They reminded her of her promise to protect Pakistani women online through the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act of 2016. “A law which was enacted in the name of ‘protecting daughters of Pakistan’ couldn’t save the precious life of one daughter, namely Naila,” they wrote. “As you must have realised by now, Naila was driven to end her life when she was constantly threatened and intimidated. There is no support system out there for women to seek help; no emotional guidance on how to deal with gender-based threats and cyber harassment.” They criticized the NR3C system and pointed out that Naila would not have had access to an NR3C office in Jamshoro. “By assigning the task of enforcing a law relating to cyber harassment, stalking and bullying to a highly centralized federal agency with regional offices confined to Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, Quetta, and Peshawar, the Ministry is failing to reach women like Naila Rind.” The minister did not acknowledge the letter or the criticism.
There are days when Nighat feels overwhelmed by the limits of the helpline. When she hears about cases like Naila’s or thinks about the constant stream of abuse and threats that Qandeel Baloch faced online every day, she feels she has taken on more than she can handle. But then Nighat reminds herself of her father and the building in Karachi that he helped to create all those years ago when he first moved to the city. For four decades, that building, where Mehar Allah worked tirelessly every day in order to earn enough to bring his family from their village to the city, was the tallest in Pakistan. Nighat knows that it takes time to build great, enduring things