[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text dp_text_size=”size-4″]QUETTA: Policeman Shazia is forty years old. She can still clearly remember her mother’s warning to her: “Never join the police force.” Despite the fact that she herself was a police officer at the time, she had offered Shazia the advise 25 years prior. Shazia is now a mother herself. Shazia nonetheless joined the police force despite being urged not to. As she worked alongside male coworkers at a police station with a male-dominated culture, her mother’s words of wisdom kept coming to mind.
Yet unlike her mother, Shazia was fortunate enough to be present when Quetta’s first women’s police station opened. Shazia is currently employed there as a policeman. The women’s police station in Quetta has been operational for quite some time, but former IGP Balochistan Mohsin Hassan Butt officially opened it last year. The building is next to the Civil Line Police Station.
This author recently went to the Quetta women’s police station. When I arrive, I see a masked female constable seated in her position. I sat with Shazia inside the police station in the SHO’s room and inquire about her mother’s reasons for not wanting her to follow in her footsteps. She asks, quickly resuming her sentence, “Do you know?” “In 2011, shortly after I joined the police department, I participated in a raid alongside my male coworkers and brought my lunch. I discovered one of my male coworkers’ mobile phone number inside the lunch box after returning from the raid. On a scrap of paper, he had scrawled it, she relates. ” “That encounter gave me an insight into the difficulties women like my mother had when working with their male coworkers in traditionally male-dominated departments like law enforcement,” she said.
Unlike to regular police stations, which can be intimidating, the women’s police station pleasantly has a homey atmosphere. She had felt like working from home ever since she started working at the women’s police station. “Thanks to our madam jee,” she says, pointing at the first SHO of the first women’s police station, Sub-Inspector Zarghuna Manzoor Tareen.
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