Over the years, I have tried to understand violence against women. Not merely the violent act itself, but the thinking that makes the act possible. The man who hits his wife is responsible for the violence; the man who rapes a child is responsible for the rape; the man who kills a woman in the name of honour is responsible for the murder. But individual culpability does not prevent us from examining the social ideas that make such violence possible. Again and again, I come back to the same underlying idea: that a woman is not fully understood as an autonomous human being. She is somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter-in-law. Her identity is repeatedly defined through the relationships she occupies until the woman herself becomes almost invisible.
I have spent years wondering about the entitlement behind violence. Is it habit, culture, sexuality, power, or the tacit permission given by generations of silence? Increasingly, I think it is all of these things, built upon something more fundamental: the belief that a woman’s autonomy is conditional.
A woman is neither chattel nor property. She does not need to be led through life by another’s hand, nor does she require permission to have a mind, a voice, an ambition, a body, or an opinion. She is as human as the man standing beside her. Yet so much of our social vocabulary tells us otherwise.
We say a girl has been given away in marriage. We speak of her being sent to another home. We congratulate a family on having settled a daughter. We teach her to adjust, to compromise, to keep the peace, to tolerate, to forgive, to protect the reputation of her family and then, after marriage, to protect the reputation of the family she has entered. We do not merely ask her to enter a marriage; we often ask her to surrender pieces of herself in order to make that marriage work.
The subcontinent’s deeply embedded idea of “kanya daan”, even where the terminology itself is not used, captures something of this mentality. A daughter leaves the home in which she was raised and is expected to make another family’s home her own. A son who establishes a separate home for his wife can be regarded as a bad son, while a daughter who leaves her parents is simply doing what daughters are supposed to do. A son who spends money on his parents is celebrated for his devotion; a daughter who does the same can be made to feel that she has somehow crossed an invisible boundary. The marriage contract may create a new family, but our social imagination often refuses to allow it to become one. The woman is transferred; the man remains.
These cultural transactions are frequently given a veneer of sanctity they do not possess—which brings us to a crucial distinction between South Asian social custom and Islam. Much of what we have normalised as religiously sanctioned behaviour towards women is rooted not in faith, but in centuries of regional patriarchy and family structures. Islam did not begin with the idea that women were transferable property. The Quran expressly recognised women as holders of inheritance rights, rejected the treatment of women as inherited property, and directed men to live with women in kindness.
That distinction matters enormously. In many instances, our culture has taken deeply patriarchal practices and placed them under a religious umbrella, making them harder to question because challenging custom is framed as challenging faith. Religion should not and cannot become a shield behind which culture escapes scrutiny.
There is another division embedded in all of this: the public and the private. Men have historically been allowed to inhabit the public world as citizens, workers, decision-makers, and owners, while women have been relegated disproportionately to the private sphere of home and family. And then, in one of the great contradictions of patriarchy, the private sphere is treated as though it is beyond scrutiny.
What happens inside the home is called a family matter. The woman inside it is expected to preserve its peace. The public world belongs to everyone; the private world, we are told, belongs to the family. Yet within that family, the woman can find herself belonging to everyone except herself.
Our legal and constitutional framework, at least in principle, begins somewhere else. Article 25 of the Constitution places equality and non-discrimination on a firm footing, recognising a woman as a citizen and a person in her own right, not merely a member of somebody else’s family.
However, I do not want to make the familiar argument that Pakistan has all the right laws and simply fails to implement them. We do not have some perfect legal architecture waiting patiently to be enforced. Over the past decade, statutory frameworks—from provincial domestic violence legislation in Sindh, Punjab, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to federal anti-rape and workplace harassment regimes—have expanded on paper. These developments matter, but law is not created in a vacuum. It is created by the very society it is expected to transform.
A law can tell a husband that violence against his wife is a crime, but it cannot by itself undo the years in which he was taught that his wife owes him obedience. A law can prohibit forced marriage, but it cannot dismantle the idea that a daughter’s marriage is a family decision. A law can criminalise an honour killing, but it cannot erase the idea that a woman’s sexuality is family property.
The history of honour crimes is a particularly uncomfortable example of this relationship between law and culture. Murder is murder, yet the legal treatment of killings committed in the name of so-called honour historically interacted with concepts of waiver and compromise. The law has had to evolve in response to an idea that should never have existed: that a family can possess a woman’s honour so completely that her death can be understood through the language of family rights. Sometimes legislation is not merely enforcing social morality; it is fighting it.
That is why the question that interests me is not simply whether we have laws protecting women, but whether we have actually accepted the woman whom those laws are supposed to protect as an autonomous person. A woman’s freedom should not depend upon whether her family approves of it. She should be able to study, work, marry or not marry, and speak her mind without each exercise of autonomy being converted into a referendum on her character.
Our obsession with a woman’s honour exposes this double standard. We have placed an extraordinary burden on the female body: her clothing, her divorce, or her refusal to comply are treated as evidence against her character. When a man leaves a relationship, he has simply moved on; when a woman does the same, her character becomes a matter of public debate.
Even our language exposes the inequality. We say that she ran away with him, but rarely that he ran away with her. He is presumed to have the freedom to move through the world; she is the one who has crossed a boundary. Then come the labels: shameless, difficult, rebellious, argumentative, characterless. Her decision becomes a statement about her morality.
This is how patriarchy survives without requiring every man to wake up one morning and consciously decide to oppress women. It survives because its rules become so ordinary that we stop seeing the problem. Girls are taught to adjust, while boys are taught to expect. A girl who speaks up is difficult; a girl who refuses to surrender is confrontational. But when she shuts up, she is praised for keeping the peace. Somewhere along the way, we forgot to ask what her own peace of heart and mind might require.
This is also where women themselves become part of the machinery. Saying this does not mean pretending that men and women occupy equal positions of power. It means acknowledging that oppressive systems are extraordinarily successful when the people living within them are taught to reproduce them. The mother tells her daughter to tolerate what she tolerated. A woman who was denied an education tells another girl that education is unnecessary. Power becomes so deeply embedded in our understanding of what is normal that we participate in reproducing the structures that limit us.
And so we create a strange contradiction. We tell women that they are equal, but continue to raise them unequally. We tell them that violence is unacceptable, but teach them that endurance is virtuous. A woman is told not to destroy the home. Then, when the violence becomes unbearable, society asks the question that should shame us: why did she not leave? We create the conditions in which leaving is difficult and then treat her inability to leave as evidence that she chose her suffering. Add children to this equation, and the trap becomes tighter. The very quality we praise in women—their willingness to sacrifice themselves for their families—can become the mechanism through which we keep them in situations that destroy them.
This entitlement is not theoretical; it has a devastating body count. We see it in the tragic murders of Noor Mukadam, Hina Javed, and Sania Zehra—and countless others whose names never reach the headlines. The home has been treated as a private kingdom, and the woman inside it as its subject. In honour killings, the language itself attempts to transform murder into morality, where a woman is killed because somebody believes her life is worth less than the family’s reputation.
Every time a child is raped, we should be forced to confront the bankruptcy of explanations that locate sexual violence primarily in women’s clothing, mobility, or social lives. The responsibility belongs entirely with the perpetrator. That seems so obvious that it should not need to be said, yet the fact that we still have to say it reveals the depth of the problem.
The problem is not only physical violence; violence is merely the most visible expression of a broader hierarchy. It appears when a woman is denied her inheritance, when a girl is removed from school, when a divorced woman becomes defined solely by her divorce, or when motherhood erases a woman’s identity. It appears in the workplace where, despite legal protections, power imbalances silence women who fear for their livelihoods.
This is why I am wary of the phrase “empower women” when used carelessly. Women do not need power handed to them as a gift; they need the barriers to their existing agency removed. They need education, economic independence, safe public spaces, and families that understand a daughter does not cease to be a person when she marries.
The same thinking applies to how we describe women’s work. No mother merely “stays” at home. A woman without a monthly salary is still managing households, navigating care, and absorbing an immense load of uncounted, invisible labour. Calling her a “stay-at-home mother” reduces the complexity of what she does because we continue to measure value through categories built around men’s paid work.
The issue, then, is that women are constantly being asked to prove that they deserve the freedom other human beings take for granted. Men have to be part of this transformation—not as benevolent rescuers, but as human beings who understand that equality is not emasculation, a woman’s refusal is not an insult, and her independence is not disobedience.
The privilege of being male is also not synonymous with being rich or connected. A poor man can be deeply disadvantaged by class while still possessing forms of social and bodily freedom that a woman in the same circumstances does not. He may walk outside without his morality being constantly examined. Being male does not constitute the same structural vulnerability that being female does.
We cannot ask legislation to do the work of parents, schools, families, and culture. Change has to come much earlier. It begins when we stop treating a woman’s freedom as a special concession. Protection that requires the surrender of autonomy is not protection; it is control. And control becomes violence when the woman resists.
A woman being called difficult is not the same as a woman being beaten, nor is a girl being denied education the same crime as a girl being raped. But they emerge from the same underlying belief: that a woman’s choices are subject to somebody else’s authority.
We cannot train our way out of a philosophy of ownership. We cannot workshop our way out of a culture that teaches women to endure and men to command. We have to change the thinking, and that change has to happen at home. A person whose autonomy depends upon the goodwill of others is never fully free.
I do not want women taught that forgiveness is always noble, silence is always graceful, or compromise is always virtuous. Sometimes speaking is necessary. Sometimes leaving is necessary. Sometimes refusing is necessary. And sometimes the most radical thing a woman can do is simply insist that her life belongs to her.
She is neither chattel nor property. She is a human being whose life, body, choices, and dignity belong to her.
Perhaps the measure of our progress will not ultimately be the number of laws we pass or convictions we secure, but the day a girl grows up without ever having to learn that her freedom is something she must negotiate, that her reputation is more valuable than her life, or that keeping everyone else comfortable is the price of being a good woman.
Until then, the work continues—from womb to tomb, and every place in between.
