Pakistan has seen this script before, only now the tools are more vicious. While journalist Gharidah Farooqi was in Islamabad doing her job during a major diplomatic weekend, part of the online crowd was busy turning her into content, slicing up her image, policing her clothes, and pushing AI-made filth into the bloodstream of public debate.
There is little value in revisiting what Farooqi wore. It was not inappropriate. Sadly, the reaction to it says more about a society that insists on policing women in public spaces.
For years, female journalists in Pakistan have been told that visibility is a liability. Speak too firmly, report too prominently, dress without seeking permission from the republic of resentful men, and your punishment will land. Instantly. Like a hammer blow. Sometimes it comes as slurs. Sometimes, as rape threats.
Now, in the age of artificial intelligence, it arrives as fabricated imagery, passed around by people who want the thrill of public shaming.
A country that struggles to accept women, nearly half its population, in positions of authority, has found a more efficient tool to cut them down to size. The target is rarely only the woman on the screen. The target is every younger reporter watching the spectacle and learning the price of ambition.
From Asma Shirazi to Meher Bokhari to Farooqi, women in the profession have been dragged through coordinated campaigns that mix political grievance with gendered contempt. The work is sidelined. The person is dismantled.
Evidence has been accumulating for years. Research on Pakistani media has consistently documented online harassment of female journalists, while global surveys place the scale far higher than most newsrooms admit. UNESCO and ICFJ have found that nearly three-quarters of women journalists face online violence, with many reporting threats that spill offline.
The state’s instinct has been to reach for broad controls. The debate around the 2025 amendments to PECA showed how quickly “regulation” can drift into speech management. That route is politically convenient and legally blunt. It will not protect women targeted with manipulated imagery. It may instead give officials wider discretion over what counts as acceptable expression, a power that has rarely been used in defence of journalists.
The law needs precision instead. Enforce image-based abuse provisions under PECA, use the amended Protection of Journalists law with urgency and create rapid complaint protocols for women journalists.
There is also a social question that cannot be legislated away. The appetite for these campaigns draws from a familiar discomfort with women who are visible, articulate, and independent. A society that treats women’s presence as provocation will keep producing these mobs, whether the weapon is a whisper campaign, a primetime slur, or a deepfake clip. The question for Pakistan is no longer whether this violence is real, but whether the state, the media industry, and political parties are willing to admit what it is: organised misogyny, modernised. *