- By: Suman Noor Abbasi
Every year in Pakistan, thousands of women are raped, burned with acid, strangled in the name of family honor, or beaten to death within the walls of their own homes the very spaces they should feel safest. The perpetrators are not always strangers lurking in the dark. They are husbands, brothers, fathers, neighbors, lift operators, and distant cousins. They walk freely, sometimes for years, empowered by a culture that treats women’s bodies as territories to be controlled and their autonomy as a threat to be silenced.
These are not distant abstractions. They are Zainab a seven-year-old girl walking to Quran class. They are Noor Mukadam a 27-year-old daughter of a diplomat tortured and beheaded by a man she knew. They are Fakhra Younus who survived 39 surgeries only to end her life in Rome because Pakistan’s justice system never delivered. They are Sana Yousaf a 17-year-old TikToker shot dead inside her own home. They are Dr. Mahnoor Nasir a young surgeon attacked with acid inside the very hospital where she went to save lives.
Before the cases, the statistics because numbers make the scale visible in a way individual stories cannot.
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), at least 405 women were killed in honor-related crimes in 2024 alone. By 2025, that number had risen to at least 470, a 16 percent increase, despite stricter legislation introduced to curb such killings. The HRCP’s 2025 report additionally documented 1,332 other femicides linked to domestic violence in the same year. Pakistan’s Minister for Human Rights informed the National Assembly in late 2025 that over 7,500 women including 1,553 killed in the name of honor were murdered across Pakistan in just four years, from 2021 to 2024.
Rape statistics are equally alarming. The Ministry’s written reply revealed that 17,771 cases of rape and gang rape were reported between 2021 and 2024. The trajectory was steeply upward: 30,757 gender-based violence cases were reported in 2021, rising to 61,997 in 2024 more than double in three years. Experts widely acknowledge that reported cases represent only a fraction of the actual total, given deep-rooted stigma, family pressure, and police hostility toward survivors.
In Sindh province specifically, honor killing cases rose 43 percent in 2024 compared to the same period the previous year, with 142 deaths,105 of them women between January and August alone. Activists describe it as a ‘stigma on society,’ noting that in feudal and tribal areas, perpetrators are often rewarded rather than punished.
Acid attacks account for more than 250 documented incidents annually. Over 700 harassment cases are officially registered each year, though again, experts believe the real number is many multiples higher. Domestic violence statistics paint a bleak picture: approximately 2,000 cases are reported annually, though surveys suggest that 28 percent of women aged 15 to 49 have experienced physical violence, and 34 percent of married women report spousal physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. One survey found that Pakistan is the sixth most dangerous country in the world for women.
Different women. Different cities. Different decades. The same country. The same silence. In Pakistan, a woman is killed, raped, burned, or beaten in the time it takes to read this sentence. The numbers say so though numbers, cold and clean, can never say it the way the women themselves would, if they were still alive to speak. On January 4, 2018, Zainab Amin Ansari — seven years old, from Kasur in Punjab — left her home for Quran recitation nearby. Her parents were away on pilgrimage. Five days later, a police constable found her body near a garbage heap. The autopsy confirmed what no one wanted to say aloud: she had been extensively raped, tortured, and strangled to death. Her killer, a 24-year-old neighbor named Imran Ali, had done this before. He confessed to similar attacks on at least seven other girls in Kasur . all between six and eight years old, all disposed of in the same manner, all in the same ten-kilometer radius. Zainab was the twelfth child to disappear from that small stretch of Punjab in a single year. Twelve. And the police had not connected the pattern, had not issued warnings, had not, it seems, treated the disappearances of poor children with sufficient urgency to stop a serial killer who then walked in Zainab’s own funeral procession, standing among the grieving, his face unknown to everyone around him. Pakistan erupted. Riots broke out in Kasur. Two people died in clashes with police. The hashtag #JusticeForZainab circled the globe. Malala Yousafzai wept publicly. Imran Ali was sentenced to death and eventually executed. From her murder came the Zainab Alert Act of 2020 a law to track missing children. A seven-year-old had to be raped and thrown in the garbage for Pakistan to build a missing child alert system. But Zainab was not the only child. She was not even the only one that year, in that city. There are girls whose names we do not know — kidnapped, raped, disposed of in fields and drains. whose cases never reached a courtroom, whose families were told to stay quiet, whose killers are still alive. The nine-year-old girl whose abduction and rape was documented more recently follows the same unbearable script: a child in a space that should have been safe, taken by someone from her own world, violated, and left to carry the weight of it.
Pakistan has a child protection crisis that runs parallel to its crisis of violence against women. They are not separate. They are the same patriarchal logic applied to smaller, more vulnerable bodies.
In Sindh, there is a word: Kari. It is applied to a woman accused of illicit relations. The accusation requires no evidence. No court. No defense. Once a woman is declared Kari by the men in her family or community, she is considered to have forfeited her right to life. She is property that has been contaminated, and contaminated property is destroyed.
Rubina Chandio was called Kari in Khairpur. She was killed. Khalida Chandio made the radical choice radical only in Pakistan’s feudal interior of marrying a man she loved, without permission. She was killed for it. On May 2, 2026, Gullan Bahro a mother of two from Sukkur district in Sindh was killed after male family members accused her of the same thing. Her children are now growing up without her. Her killers used the Kari label as a murder license, as thousands before them had done.
These women did not die in remote antiquity. Gullan Bahro died five weeks ago. The honor killing is not always framed as such. Sometimes it is a woman who chose her own husband — like Khalida Chandio in Khairpur, like the young woman in Balochistan whose killing was captured on video in 2025, her own brother handing her a copy of the Holy Quran before the men around her ended her life on tribal council orders. Sixteen people were arrested in that case. The Senate condemned it. The country was outraged for a news cycle.
And then it happened again. In July 2025, a married woman named Sidra Bibi was killed by order of a local jirga an informal tribal council with no legal authority to sentence anyone to anything under the Constitution of Pakistan. After her murder, the same men who had ordered or enabled her death gathered to offer her Namaz-e-Janaza, her funeral prayer. They stood in rows, hands folded, reciting Fatiha for the woman their judgment had killed. The performative mourning was not incidental. It was the system functioning exactly as designed violence laundered through ritual, grief weaponized into cover.
A jirga ordered her death. A jirga prayed over her body. And somewhere, a police station did not file an FIR.
Acid is cheap. You can buy it at hardware shops, battery dealers, chemical suppliers. There is no identity check. No purchase limit. No record of who bought it or why. For a few hundred rupees the cost of a meal a man in Pakistan can purchase the means to permanently destroy a woman’s face, her body, her future, and her place in a society that will then treat her as unfit to be seen. They are carrying it like a shampoo bottle or water bottle.
Fakhra Younus was eighteen when she met him. Bilal Khar, the son of a former Punjab Governor who introduced himself as an unmarried customs officer. He was neither. He had three wives already. By the time she discovered the truth, she was already surviving years of abuse. When she finally left and moved back to her mother’s home in Karachi, he came after her. On May 14, 2000, he arrived with an accomplice while she slept, and poured acid over her. Her five-year-old son was in the room. Four witnesses saw it. An FIR was registered. A case was filed.
And then the Khar family with its political connections, its money, its feudal influence went to work. Witnesses were pressured. Relatives retracted. The man who had been seen fleeing the crime scene by four eyewitnesses was acquitted in 2003. The judge signed the order in six pages, instantly, on the same day arguments were heard. Bilal Khar walked free.
HRCP data from 2024 shows 67 First Action Reports were lodged for honor killings in Balochistan in a single year. Sixty-seven FIRs, in a province where the real number of killings is known to be far higher, and where, as activists note, perpetrators in feudal and tribal areas are frequently rewarded by their communities rather than prosecuted by the state.
The Italian government did what Pakistan would not. Italy offered Fakhra shelter, care, and 39 reconstructive surgeries over twelve years to rebuild a face and body that acid had dissolved. Twelve years of hospitals and mirrors and surgeries and a justice system that had, from across an ocean, made its position clear: her suffering was not worth punishing.
On March 17, 2012, Fakhra Younus jumped from the sixth floor of her apartment in Rome. Her suicide note said she was ending her life because of the ‘silence of law on the atrocities and the insensitivity of Pakistani rulers.’ She was 32 years old. Pakistan’s first Oscar won that year for the documentary Saving Face, which featured acid attack survivors was announced less than a month before her death. A country celebrated internationally for documenting its own women’s suffering while the woman at the center of that suffering concluded there was nothing left to live for.
The Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention Act of 2011 came partly from her case. Section 336-B of the Pakistan Penal Code now makes acid attacks punishable by life imprisonment or death, with mandatory fines. On paper, this is real progress. On the ground, acid is still sold on the roadside. The Acid Survivors Foundation has long demanded a Comprehensive Acid and Burn Crime Bill for all provinces as of this writing, it has not been passed.
On June 6, 2026 Dr. Mahnoor Nasir, a 29-year-old postgraduate surgical trainee at Sandeman Civil Hospital in Quetta, was on duty in the surgical ward when there was a knock at her room door. She opened it. Humayun Shah, a contractual lift operator employed at the same hospital, threw acid on her face, her abdomen, her legs, and her right hand.
She suffered burns across 13 percent of her body, with deep wounds covering seven to eight percent. She was airlifted to Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi. Her eyes were affected but her vision survived. A team of plastic surgeons and ophthalmologists assessed her.
Twenty-six years separate Fakhra Younus and Dr. Mahnoor Nasir. In those twenty-six years, laws were passed, films were made, awards were won, and conferences were held. And a man still carried acid to a hospital and threw it on a woman who had done nothing except refuse his attention.
On the night of September 9, 2020, a French-Pakistani woman was driving on the Sialkot-Lahore Motorway with her three young children. Her car ran out of fuel and stalled on the road. She called family members who set out to help her. She waited. Two men Abid Ali and Shafqat Ali came first. They smashed the car window. They dragged her out. They robbed her of her money and jewelry. They took her to a nearby field and raped her at gunpoint while her children watched.
The country was horrified and then made more horrified still when the then-Lahore police chief, at a press conference, said that the woman should not have been traveling that road alone at that hour. That if she had taken a different route, this might not have happened. His words prompted protests in every major city. Women who had been assaulted and then blamed before stood in the streets and said: enough.
Both men were convicted and sentenced to death by an anti-terrorism court in March 2021. The Lahore High Court upheld those sentences in June 2026. DNA evidence, mobile phone location data, and the survivor’s testimony built a case the court called overwhelming. It was a rare moment of full accountability in a legal system that more often offers its women something far less.
But the police chief’s words have not been un-said. They live in the institutional memory of every woman in Pakistan who was asked what she was wearing, why she was out, why she had gone there, why she had married him, why she hadn’t told anyone sooner. Victim-blaming is not one man’s opinion. It is the cultural operating system under which this violence is administered and normalized.
There is a particular cruelty in the domestic violence statistics because they confirm what survivors have always known and what society has always denied: the most dangerous place for a woman in Pakistan is her own home. The man most likely to hurt her is the one she lives with.
Asma Begum said no to her husband. Not to her jailer, not to a stranger to the man she had married, in the bed they shared, in the home that bore her name. That refusal an ordinary human right, one that Islamic jurisprudence itself does not negate was treated as provocation. The violence that followed was treated as a private matter. Her calls for help were absorbed into the silence of a system that prefers marriages intact and women quiet.
In Pakistan, 34 percent of married women report spousal abuse that is physical, sexual, or emotional. Two thousand domestic violence cases are filed each year and activists estimate the true number is ten to twenty times higher. Most women do not report. They have been told, by family, by police, by culture, that the home is not the court’s business. That a husband’s anger is a wife’s fault. That separation, if sought, will shame the family more than the bruises ever could.
Sania Zehra was raped gang-raped in front of her own children. Not on a motorway, not in a field, not by strangers in the dark. In a space that should have been the safest in her world. And her children watched it happen. The violence was designed that way: not just to harm the woman but to perform the harm in front of those she loved, to make the degradation total, to ensure that even in memory, there was no room that remained untouched.
This is what domestic and intimate-partner violence does. It doesn’t just break bodies. It breaks the architecture of home itself, so that the word “HOME” loses its meaning, and what remains is a space defined by fear.
Sana Yousaf had just turned seventeen. She posted her birthday video — pink and cream cake, balloon arch, the Margalla Hills in the background, her long hair moving in the breeze to 1.1 million TikTok followers. She promoted Chitrali culture. She advocated for girls’ education. She was, in the way of her generation, making herself visible as a form of existence.
Less than twenty-four hours later, a 22-year-old man named Umar Hayat arrived at her family home in Islamabad’s G-13 sector with a pistol. He had been pursuing her. She had repeatedly refused him. He shot her twice in the chest. Her aunt, sitting nearby, heard what she thought was a balloon popping. Hayat then tried to shoot the aunt too. The gun jammed. He fled.
Islamabad Police arrested him within twenty hours. He confessed. Pakistan’s Interior Minister praised the swift action. And across the country, while some mourned, others — in comment sections, in WhatsApp groups, in the kind of conversations that happen just below the surface of public life — said things about what Sana had been wearing, what she had been posting, what she had done to provoke him. A 17-year-old girl was shot dead in her home and strangers on the internet found ways to hold her responsible for the bullet.
Sana was not the first. In the five months before her murder, two other female social media influencers had been killed in Pakistan. A fifteen-year-old named Hira was shot dead by her own father and uncle in Quetta for refusing to stop posting on TikTok. Digital visibility had become, for Pakistani women, a form of courage — and a form of risk. The men who could not control what women posted found ways to control the women instead.
Ishal Fatima’s case follows a similar thread. from Jhang concerning a teenage college student whose death sparked outrage and renewed fears about the vulnerability of young women and girls. Barely twenty-four to forty-eight hours after the attack on Dr. Mahnoor Nasir shocked the country, another young woman’s name began circulating across Pakistan ishaal Fatima.
Noor Mukadam was twenty-seven years old, the daughter of a retired diplomat, educated and loved. On July 20, 2021, she was found murdered at a residential address in Islamabad’s F-7 sector. She had been tortured. She had been raped. She had been beheaded.
Zahir Jaffer son of a wealthy industrialist, Pakistani-American, a man from the gilded circle of Islamabad’s privileged elite was arrested at the crime scene. The investigation revealed Noor had been held for approximately forty hours. She had tried to escape multiple times. The household staff had blocked her. Data recovered from Jaffer’s phone showed prior patterns of violence against women. He had done this, in smaller increments, before.
His parents his father a leading businessman, his mother from the Adamji family were arrested for concealing evidence. They were later acquitted. Two domestic workers who had helped him confine her received ten-year sentences. And Zahir Jaffer himself, after a trial that gripped Pakistan, was sentenced to death.
He appealed. The Islamabad High Court upheld the sentence. He appealed again. In May 2025, the Supreme Court of Pakistan upheld the death penalty, calling him a ‘ruthless killer not worthy of sympathy’ and employing, in a landmark legal move, the Silent Witness Theory ruling that CCTV footage constitutes admissible primary evidence even without an eyewitness.
It took four years. Four years of hearings and arguments and appeals while Noor’s father sat in courtrooms and said again and again: my daughter was unjustly killed. And justice, at the end, was delivered but justice for Noor Mukadam required a family with resources, public pressure, media coverage, and the stamina to fight through an entire appellate system. Most murdered women have none of those things. Most murdered women’s families are told to settle. Most murdered women are buried and forgotten before the year is out.
Noor Mukadam’s case became a symbol not only of what was done to her, but of what is required to obtain accountability and how few women in Pakistan can access what it takes.
The laws exist. Pakistan passed the Anti-Honor Killing Amendment in 2016, closing the loophole that allowed families to pardon their own killers. The Acid Crime Prevention Act of 2011 made acid attacks punishable by death. The Domestic Violence Act, passed federally in 2020, created formal protection mechanisms. The Zainab Alert Act built an infrastructure for missing children. These are not nothing.
They are also, in the daily lived reality of millions of Pakistani women, not enough.
The jirga still meets. It still orders deaths. It still operates as though the Constitution does not apply within its circle. And when the Prime Minister’s office as was reported in 2025 evaluates proposals to revive formalized jirga authority in tribal areas, the message sent to every jirga in every village is: your power is legitimate. The state endorses it. Women’s lives are subject to your judgment.
The police station still turns women away. The FIR still goes unfiled. The officer still asks what she was wearing, why she was out, whether she had done something to bring this on herself. The Lahore motorway rape survivor experienced this publicly, her violation compounded by institutional re-violation. The women who don’t make the news experience it privately, daily, and they do not come back.
The acid is still on the shelf. It costs three hundred rupees. There is no registry. The Acid Survivors Foundation has been lobbying for a Comprehensive Acid and Burn Crime Bill across all provinces for over a decade. The bills have been tabled. They have not been passed. And so on June 6, 2026, a lift operator in a government hospital walked to a doctor’s room with acid in his hands, and threw it on her, and the only thing that stopped him from doing it again was a police encounter later that same day.
The shelter system is critically inadequate. There are fewer than thirty functional Dar-ul-Aman facilities across a country of nearly 250 million people. Most are underfunded, understaffed, and unable to take new residents. A woman who leaves violence has, in most of Pakistan, nowhere to go. Returning to the family that pressured her into silence is often her only option.
And beneath all of it, beneath every failed FIR and every jirga decision and every acid bottle sold without a record, there is the cultural bedrock: the belief, held by enough men in enough communities, that a woman’s body and choices are not her own. That her marriage is her family’s decision. That her refusal of intimacy is a form of disobedience. That her visibility on social media is an invitation to be punished. That her choice of a husband is a stain on a family’s honor that can only be washed clean in blood. That her life, when weighed against male pride, male ego, or male desire, is lighter.This belief is not a fringe position. It is, in significant portions of Pakistan’s social geography, consensus.
These all women did not ask for extraordinary courage. They asked for the ordinary right to walk to class, to open a door, to say no, to choose a husband, to post a birthday video, to come home. These are not political demands. They are the minimum conditions of a human life. And in Pakistan, in 2026, they remain for too many women out of reach.
The dead cannot speak. But they spoke before they died in FIRs that were not filed, in help calls that went unanswered, in rejections that were not respected, in months of harassment that no institution was positioned to interrupt. The system heard them and looked away.
To write about these women is not to sensationalize their deaths. It is to refuse the silence that their killers, their communities, their institutions, and sometimes their own families have tried to enforce. It is to insist that their lives mattered not as symbols, not as statistics, not as cautionary tales for other women to be more careful but as lives. Whole, irreplaceable, worth more than the family honor or the male pride that extinguished them. Say them out loud. That is the least we owe them.
Women’s rights are not Western rights, foreign rights, elite rights, or controversial rights. They are human rights. The right to walk safely, to refuse a proposal, to choose a spouse, to leave an abusive home, to pursue an education, to work, to speak, to be visible, and ultimately to live—these are not privileges granted by fathers, husbands, communities, or states. They are rights that belong to women by virtue of their humanity.
Pakistan’s Constitution promises equality. Its laws increasingly recognize the crimes committed against women. Yet rights that exist only on paper are not rights at all. They become meaningful only when police register complaints, when courts deliver timely justice, when shelters are available, when survivors are protected, and when communities reject the belief that a woman’s life can be weighed against honor, reputation, or male pride.
The measure of a society is not how loudly it condemns a murder after it happens. It is how effectively it prevents the murder from happening at all. Every woman named in this article was failed long before she died. Many sought help. Many reported threats. Many said no. Many tried to leave. The tragedy is not merely that they were killed. The tragedy is that warning after warning was ignored.
A nation cannot claim progress while half its population lives with the constant calculation of risk. Until Pakistani women can move through their homes, schools, workplaces, streets, and digital spaces without fear, the struggle for justice remains unfinished. The fight against violence toward women is not a women’s issue. It is a human rights issue, a constitutional issue, and a test of whether Pakistan is willing to uphold the dignity and equality it promises to all its citizens.
The dead cannot be brought back. But the living can still choose what kind of country they want to build. The question is whether Pakistan will continue to ask women to adapt to violence or finally demand that violence adapt to the law.
The issue is not simply that women continue to suffer violence. The issue is that too many warnings go unheard, too many cries for help go unanswered, and too many lives are treated as expendable. Behind every statistic is a human being who deserved safety, dignity, freedom, and the chance to live without fear.
A society cannot call itself just while women are forced to calculate risks for choices as ordinary as going to school, pursuing a career, choosing a partner, expressing themselves, or simply returning home. These are not extraordinary demands. They are basic human rights.
Real change requires more than laws on paper. It requires accountability, enforcement, education, and a collective rejection of the beliefs that enable violence and excuse it after the fact. The responsibility belongs not only to governments and institutions but to communities, families, and individuals who shape the values of future generations.
The question is no longer whether there is a crisis. The question is how many more lives must be shattered before protecting women becomes a priority rather than a promise. Until every woman can live freely and safely, justice remains incomplete, and the nation’s progress remains unfinished.