She was seventeen.

Not old enough to vote, not old enough to drive, but old enough, apparently, to be blamed for her own murder. Her videos had started gaining traction online. Just harmless, everyday glimpses into the life of a teenager in Islamabad. But soon, her voice – like the voices of many young girls before her – became too loud. Her face too public. Her laughter, her online presence, her very being, somehow all became justifications for what happened next.

The day news of her death broke, it spread like wildfire across social media. And within hours, so did the commentary; why was she socially expressive and maintaining presence online? What were her parents doing? Girls today have no boundaries. No shame. And many went on to appreciate this heinous crime. This wasn’t concern. It was control, masquerading as culture. A young girl had been killed, and the loudest voices weren’t asking how to protect others like her. They were trying to decide if she had deserved it.

Not long before that, Islamabad’s F-9 Park, often considered as a safe public space for families and joggers, became the site of a chilling incident. A disturbing video showed a man dragging two women by their hair outside the park’s famous fast-food outlet, beating them and stealing their belongings in broad daylight. Their screams echoed as bystanders stood frozen – while no one intervened. The violence was brutal, but what was equally haunting was the apathy. The fact that this happened in such a public space, with so many witnesses and so little response, speaks to something deeper; the normalization of violence against women, and the collapse of our collective responsibility.

What’s often criticized in online conversations after such incidents, isn’t the violence itself, but women’s presence – how they speak, how they dress, their visibility, or whether they dare to laugh too loudly. I have skimmed through the online users’ reactions and found most of the men justifying harm, mentioning; she was outspoken, she was active on social media, she wore something bold, she was walking alone. The subtext is always the same; if a woman is harmed, she must’ve done something to deserve it.

And yet, time and again, that narrative falls apart.

Most of us remember the incident from 2022 that sent shockwaves across the media and online spaces, igniting outrage and demands for justice. A woman, covered head to toe, was walking in Islamabad’s I-10 sector. No camera, no followers, no posts – just another person minding her business in the country’s capital. And yet, she was grabbed, harassed and assaulted, in broad daylight, in full view of others. There were no excuses to reach for this time. No profile pictures to scrutinize. No videos to dissect. She had done everything society says a woman should do to be safe, and still, she wasn’t.

So, what now? What more must women erase from themselves to be left alone?

In Pakistan, we’ve facilitated a culture where silence is portrayed as safety, and visibility is treated like a sin. A society where even when a woman complies with every expectation – is blamed, not the men who harm her. If you speak up, you’re asking for trouble. If you stay quiet, you’re complicit. If you wear jeans, you’re immoral. If you wear a burqa, you’re still not safe.

It’s exhausting. It’s cruel. And it’s deliberate.

Last year, I was in Nepal for some work – spending a few days moving between my accommodation and our local office in Kathmandu. In the mornings and late into the evenings, walking around the city, what struck me most wasn’t the mountains or the temples. It was the women – everywhere. Behind the counters, on roadside stalls, on bikes, in uniforms, in everyday wear. They weren’t just visible. they were present. In every rhythm of daily life. The smallest, most casual tasks weren’t coded male or female. And what truly stood out was the normalcy of it all. Kathmandu must be doing something right. It made me ask myself, why can’t our cities feel like this? Why can’t our women move through spaces without having to measure every step or word or glance?

We are not an apolitical society when it comes to women, we are selectively political. Loud, reactive, judgmental, when it comes to women’s choices. But utterly silent when it comes to the systems that make those choices dangerous.

Pakistan has close to 4,000 laws. Around 100 are supposed to protect the human rights of women, children, and marginalized communities. These aren’t new. They didn’t appear yesterday. And yet here we are, in 2025, still counting cases and bodies instead of enforcing justice. Just last year in Punjab alone, there were 1,059 reported cases of rape. 150 cases of so-called honor killings. 413 gang rapes. And that’s just what made it to official reports. We all know what doesn’t get reported. We know the stories women bury in shame because they’ve been told the system won’t believe them or worse, that the system will punish them for speaking. Laws are meaningless without application. Rights are irrelevant without respect. And reforms don’t matter if we don’t change what we’re teaching our sons.

The data paints a grim picture, but it doesn’t live in a vacuum. These acts of violence are not random, they are seeded in the way we socialize boys, enable men, and silence women. Because here’s the thing, men don’t learn to harm women in adulthood. They learn long before that. They learn it when they watch their fathers interrupt their mothers. When they hear jokes at school about teaching her a lesson. When they’re told that boys don’t cry, don’t listen, don’t yield. When they see their sisters do the chores while they get to rest. When teachers excuse them for misbehaving because, boys will be boys. That’s where it begins.

And if we don’t interrupt that learning early, we can’t unlearn the consequences later.

The truth is, patriarchy is not just the dominance of men. It’s the socialization of boys into power, and the normalization of violence when power is challenged. It’s a script. And unless we start rewriting it at home, in classrooms, in our communities, it will keep producing the same tragedies, over and over again.

Mothers have a role. Teachers have a role. Fathers, perhaps the most, have a role. Not in disciplining their daughters, but in educating their sons. Every time we excuse bad behavior, or tell girls to be careful, or tell women they should’ve stayed quiet, we’re feeding a machine that runs on silence.

What if we shifted that energy? What if, instead of dissecting every aspect of a victim’s life, we started dissecting our systems? What if we asked; why did the police take so long to register her case? Why aren’t gender-based violence units fully resourced? Why is the conviction rate so low that women don’t even bother seeking justice? What if we treated misogyny like the social illness, it is, one that needs prevention, not just punishment?

We are long past the point where token outrage is enough. Long past the point where another name trending on social media should be what wakes us up. What we need now is radical accountability, inside our homes, in our schools, in our institutions.

We need more than outrage. We need resolve. And we need to stop framing women’s visibility as the problem. The problem is never a woman being visible, it’s a system that makes her visibility dangerous. This isn’t just about safety. It’s about power. Who has it? Who protects it? And who pays the price for it.

That seventeen-year-old girl? She had dreams. So does every girl posting a video, raising her voice, daring to be seen. Her voice was not a threat. It was a light. And we dimmed it because it made someone uncomfortable.

So maybe it’s time we stop telling women to shrink. Maybe we start telling boys to unlearn. Maybe we hold our institutions accountable not for how quickly they react, but for how much they prevent. Maybe we create a world where being a girl online, or anywhere, doesn’t feel like a gamble.

Because the real question isn’t why she spoke up. It’s why we didn’t.

About the Author: Asif Farooqui is the Director of Programs at the Accountability Lab Pakistan, and can be reached at asif@accountabilitylab.org