The Supreme Court, in Khursheed Ahmad v The State, did something our institutions rarely manage. It named the domestic violence ecosystem plainly, not as a scandal, not as a spectacle, but as a structure. Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim’s judgment did more than uphold a conviction for the murder of Gulshan Bibi; it recorded the social choreography that so often precedes a woman’s death, wherein she leaves, she is persuaded back, she returns to what the court called a “living hell.”
That phrase matters because it shifts the centre of gravity, recognising that murder in an abusive home is rarely a sudden bolt. It is the last chapter of a story written with family pressure, community silence, police indifference, and the convenient fiction that what happens inside four walls is “private”.
The national picture is now too well documented for denial. According to a recent Sustainable Social Development Organisation (SSDO) mapping of gender-based violence across Pakistan in 2024, a total of 32,617 cases were reported, including 5,339 incidents of rape, 2,238 domestic violence cases and 547 so-called honour killings. Conviction rates remained critically low, underscoring institutional apathy and systemic failure.
Those figures should end the habit of treating each headline as an isolated tragedy, for they describe a justice chain that is either absent or broken at every link, starting from the first stage, where the complaint is discouraged, to mishandled medical examinations, weak investigations, pressurised witnesses, and trials that stretch until a survivor’s life collapses into exhaustion or compromise. Our system is simply unwilling to establish accountability, teaching every perpetrator that he can wait it out. Cases that stay in public memory do so because they expose the state’s uneven appetite for enforcement. The killing of Qandeel Baloch, whose brother walked free after securing a family pardon, showed how compromise provisions can be weaponised even when the country claims legal tightening on honour crimes. What makes the Supreme Court’s intervention here significant is that it challenges the most socially acceptable accomplice in domestic violence: the family council that sends an abused woman back because divorce is shameful and because a daughter’s safety is weighed against a household’s reputation.
Law, meanwhile, continues to arrive in fragments. In November 2025, the National Assembly passed the domestic violence bill for Islamabad Capital Territory, widening the scope of abuse to include psychological and economic violence. This is welcome, yet we cannot overlook how protection orders are only as effective as the policeman who serves them, the court that monitors them, and the prosecution that pursues breach without waiting for grievous harm. There is also a lesson here about state narrative. Pakistan has often defended its social fabric against external critique by stressing family values and community cohesion. That argument cannot survive a reality where families are coerced into becoming enforcement arms of abuse. We finally have an opportunity to force a reckoning in courtrooms, in police stations, in legislative chambers and in the quiet drawing rooms where women still plead to be believed and to be safe. *