The ASP who built Pakistan's first gender protection unit

“Why not?” — the question that started everything

The episode opens with Muzamil asking Amna Baig a question that sounds simple but isn’t: what made a woman from a conventional household decide to join the police? Amna’s answer goes back further than the CSS exam. It goes back to her mother.

“I always said that when I eventually have a daughter — I’m a feminist at heart — she must grow up to say that I want to do something that my mother is doing.” Her mother, she explains, was an exceptionally brilliant student who married early. The resources and permission to continue her education were never given. Amna did not want to carry that same regret forward.

Her father was a civil servant in the Pakistan Administrative Service, which meant the family moved constantly — she started school in southern Punjab, passed through several postings, and eventually sat her metric exams at Hamza Public School in Rawalpindi. No private school. No elite coaching. “My father could not afford a private school. He was a civil servant.”

She graduated from NUST in 2013, having spent four years quietly working on the one thing she knew would hold her back: English. The CSS exam, she notes, has an English composition component that filters out enormous numbers of otherwise capable candidates — people who grew up in Urdu-medium schools, who never had the exposure, who are brilliant by any other measure.

Failing the first time, and what came after

Amna did not clear the CSS on her first attempt. She missed by two marks on that English composition paper. “I went into complete depression,” she says plainly. What pulled her out was a circle of people — her brothers, and the man who is now her husband, who was then a close friend. They pushed her to sit the exam again.

The second time, she passed. And she had always known which service she wanted. Her father had been in the administrative group — DMG — and had pushed her toward it. She refused. “I told him that’s boring.” Police was her first priority from the start.

When she went before the interview panel, they asked the question that, as she notes, they would almost certainly not have asked a male candidate: how would she manage field work? Her answer was direct. “My father did it. I saw him do it. Why can’t I?”

The interview went well. She was inducted as an Assistant Superintendent of Police, the entry-level officer rank, and began the two-year training pipeline — the Civil Services Academy in Lahore, then the National Police Academy in Islamabad, then a field attachment in Gujarat — before being posted as a Subdivisional Police Officer.

What the job actually looks like

Muzamil asks Amna to describe what an ASP’s day-to-day work involves, and she pushes back gently on the assumption that it must be different for a woman. “Whatever my male colleagues are doing, I’m doing the same.” At the SDPO level, that means supervision and management of crime, security, and everything in between — murder scenes, case files, data, law and order duty, all of it.

She is candid about the emotional weight. “You’re constantly dealing with negativity of sorts. It’s crime. It’s people coming to you crying, in distress. You’re seeing a lot of things which, I think, unconsciously impacts you.” She says she has changed over the years, and believes most police officers do. She does not dramatize it — she says she loves her job and would not give it up — but she does not pretend the cost isn’t real either.

The hardest moment she shares is the death of a colleague. A SHO she had worked closely with was shot in front of his wife and children by someone he had previously arrested. His father had been martyred at the same police station before him. “You lose a brother. It’s the feeling I can’t explain. You can’t shake off the feeling looking at his children, who were like eight or ten years old.”

Minimal resources, maximum stretch

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises the question of whether Islamabad Police has grown in terms of resources over the past decade and a half. Amna disagrees with the framing that nothing has changed, but she is equally honest about the constraints that remain.

The core problem, she argues, is human resource stretch. “This one inspector or sub-inspector or ASI has to write his case file, he has to arrest the person, he has to go for the DNA, he has to do the law-and-order duty, he has to do his duty officer duty, he has to do the gush as well. Of course quality is compromised.” She has been vocal, she says, about the need for more officers.

She also points to the criminal justice system as a whole. Even when police do their work well, conviction rates suffer because cases collapse at other points in the chain — in the courts, or because the parties involved reach a private settlement. “Most of the times, you must have worked hard on a case, you must have tried your best to ensure something goes to trial and conviction — however, what would happen is that the parties would compromise.”

On drugs, she is similarly clear-eyed. Police can work to stop supply, but the community has to be part of the solution. “As long as community support nahin hai, police itself cannot do much.” She points specifically to educational institutions as a site of concern, and to parents who are not close enough to their children to notice early warning signs.

The Gender Protection Unit — and why it exists

This is the section of the conversation that carries the most weight. Amna describes how the Gender Protection Unit came to exist, and the logic behind it is almost embarrassingly simple once she explains it.

When she was posted to a subdivision in Punjab — the first female officer ever posted there in 40 to 50 years — her staff noticed something within three months. Female complainants who had never come in before started arriving. Women who had not felt safe walking into a police station staffed entirely by men were now willing to come. “Women feel more comfortable speaking to women.”

At the same time, she was receiving complaints through social media — women from across Pakistan messaging her directly, asking for help. When she or her team would respond and ask them to come in, the answer was often the same: can we do it over the phone? “There is a taboo attached with women going to a police station in this country.”

The solution she designed, with the support of a senior officer she credits by name — SSP Usman Yunus — was a helpline staffed by female officers, who would go to the complainant rather than requiring the complainant to come to them. It worked in Rawalpindi. When she was posted to Islamabad, she replicated it.

The Gender Protection Unit is now based in F-6, Islamabad. The helpline number is 8090. It is toll-free. It is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is also a walk-in facility — not a police station, she is careful to say, but a service center — that operates on the same hours. Female officers respond to calls and, where needed, go directly to wherever the woman is. The unit serves women, children, and transgender persons.

In its first month of operation, it received over 130 complaints and walk-ins. Amna was preparing to release the data publicly at the time of recording.

Financial independence as the only real answer

The conversation turns to gender-based violence more broadly, and Amna makes an argument she clearly believes deeply. The reason most cases end in reconciliation — even cases involving severe physical violence — is not forgiveness. It is the absence of any alternative.

She describes a woman who walked into her office having been shot four times by her husband. She had survived. She wanted him arrested. But she had no clothes — he had taken everything. She had three children. Her elderly father could not support her. Her brother’s family already filled the house. “She said, ‘Cabinet mein kahan jaaun?’ Can you imagine what she’s been going through?” Weeks later, the woman sent Amna a message asking if she could help her find a job. “How am I supposed to survive?”

“I feel that identities are totally dependent on the man in the house,” Amna says. “And one of the reasons is that there’s a vicious cycle of dependency on the men by all these women.” Financial independence, in her view, is not an abstract feminist principle. It is the practical mechanism by which women gain the ability to leave.

Muzamil asks her to address the portion of the Pakistani public that opposes women’s financial independence. Her answer is measured: most of them, she believes, are simply not aware of what the alternative looks like in practice. They are in their own silos. The cases she sees every day are not visible to them.

Social media, community policing, and humanizing the force

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Amna discuss how officers using social media has changed the relationship between the police and the public. Amna joined Twitter at the urging of a batchmate who felt there was a gap — a community looking for answers and finding no one to connect with on the other side.

She describes a case where a CCTV clip surfaced on Twitter, people flagged it publicly, officers responded, and the suspect was behind bars within a few hours. “I think that’s incredibly powerful where we’re going in terms of real-time intelligence sharing.”

But she is clear that her own presence on social media was never about personal profile. “It was never about me. It was always about the department.” She uses it to highlight female officers, to share the human side of police work, and to fill the information gap that formal statements — carefully worded and always delayed — cannot fill.

Pakistan in 2050

Muzamil asks Amna where she sees Pakistan when her generation is in power. She does not give a policy answer. She gives a cultural one.

“The thing that I would want is that I would not want us to be discussing women’s issues anymore. It should be normal by then.” She should not, she says, be invited to speak at events because it is remarkable that a woman achieved something in uniform. The daughters growing up now should not have to think twice about whether a career is “for them or not for them.”

“I would want to see a more equal world. And I think we would.”

She is not naive about the distance between now and then. But she is also not pessimistic. Ten years ago, she says, nobody was talking about women’s rights publicly. Now men and women both are. The direction is right, even if the pace is slow.