A mother of a 15-month-old killed in Dera Ghazi Khan this week should not (and cannot) be filed away as another crime brief, another grisly item for the metro pages or another sorrow to be consumed with morning tea and forgotten by lunch. Her father told police she had complained of abuse a day earlier, resisted returning to her in-laws’ house, was persuaded to go back, and was dead soon after, allegedly stoned by the very men who shared that household with her.
The horror is intimate, domestic, ordinary in the most damning sense, and that is precisely why it deserves national attention rather than ritual condemnation. Pakistan has spent years passing laws, issuing statements and staging official concern. At the same time, women continue to die in homes, courtyards, police jurisdictions and tribal shadows where the state arrives late, speaks loudly and leaves little behind except paperwork.
The numbers are now too ugly to be swept under the rug. Official data placed before the National Assembly last year showed 173,367 cases of violence against women from 2021 to 2024, with more than 7,500 women killed in that four-year period, including 1,553 in the name of honour. Meanwhile, the country managed a conviction rate of 0.5 per cent for rape and honour killing cases.
Pakistan already has enough legislative architecture to know what should happen next – the Punjab Protection of Women against Violence Act of 2016 promised protection, relief and rehabilitation, the federal Domestic Violence Act of 2020 created a legal framework in Islamabad, and the Anti-Rape Act of 2021 aimed to fix broken investigation and trial practices, while the 2016 honour-crime amendments were supposed to narrow the path to forgiveness and impunity. Yet the distance between text and enforcement remains the central scandal. That distance has been visible for decades, from Samia Sarwar, murdered in 1999 in a lawyer’s office after seeking divorce, to Qandeel Baloch, killed in 2016 by a brother who spoke the language of family shame, to the Balochistan killings caught on video last year, where public outrage surged only after a clip forced the country to watch what it already knew.
So the conversation that matters now is not whether violence against women is a crisis, because that question was settled long ago, nor whether culture is to blame in some vague ceremonial way, because culture becomes criminal when politicians patronise the men who enforce it, and families treat a woman’s fear as negotiable. The state must publish district-wise prosecution data every quarter, expand women protection centres and anti-rape crisis cells beyond pilot logic, ring-fence forensic and shelter funding, punish police for coercing “compromise”, and treat jirga-sanctioned violence as a direct assault on constitutional order. We cannot keep advertising modernity to the world while subcontracting justice to customs and patriarchy. *