About Hifazat

How the assessment works

You describe your situation, either in your own words or by answering a set of questions. That description is matched against the National Commission on the Status of Women's standardised indicators on violence against women, which is the framework Pakistan's own institutions use to classify these cases.

A language model then writes the explanation, the severity assessment and the action steps. It is given only the laws and helplines that apply to you, so it works from a narrowed set rather than from everything it happens to know.

Why we ask where you live

Domestic violence law in Pakistan is provincial, not national. There is no single countrywide domestic violence act: Sindh passed its own in 2013, Balochistan in 2014, Punjab in 2016 and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2021, while the 2012 act often described as federal applies only in Islamabad.

Telling someone in Peshawar to rely on a law that does not operate where she lives is worse than telling her nothing. So before the assessment is written, the system filters the law down to the statutes actually in force in your province, and to the ones that protect someone of your gender. The model is never shown the rest.

The same is true of helplines. The Punjab women's helpline does not answer calls from Sindh, so it is not offered there.

How we verify helplines

Every organisation in our directory is marked either confirmed or awaiting confirmation. Confirmed means someone has checked that the number reaches the service described. Awaiting confirmation means the organisation is real and worth contacting, but we have not verified the contact details we hold.

Two rules follow from that, and they are enforced in the software rather than left to good intentions:

• The assessment can only recommend a confirmed number. It is not shown the others at all.
• In the directory, an unconfirmed number is never a tap-to-call link. Those organisations appear separately, with their website instead.

What happens to what you write

Your account of what happened is not stored. It is sent to be assessed, the answer comes back, and it is not kept against your name or your device. We do not ask you to make an account and we do not ask for your identity.

We keep anonymous counts — how many assessments came from each province, which categories came up, how long the answer took. These carry no name, no number and none of your words.

The one exception is if you choose to ask a lawyer to contact you. Then, and only then, your name, your number and what you described are passed to the legal desk, and only because you ticked the box asking us to.

What it gets wrong

Being honest about this matters more than looking capable:

• It is written by a language model and can be wrong, incomplete, or out of date. Check anything you plan to act on.
• Laws change. Penalties and procedures described here may have been amended since they were written down.
• It knows the law as written, not how a particular police station or court behaves in practice.
• The NCSW framework it classifies against was written about violence against women. We apply gender-neutral law where it fits, but the coverage for men and transgender people is thinner, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
• It is not a crisis counsellor and it cannot send anyone to you. In an emergency, call 15.

Where the law comes from

The classification framework is the NCSW Standardized Indicators on Violence against Women in Pakistan. The legal provisions are drawn from the Pakistan Penal Code, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016, the Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act 2010 as amended in 2022, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018, the family law statutes, and each province's own domestic violence legislation.