EDITORIAL: Another day in Pakistan: another young woman silenced by the brutal hands of male violence. The tragedy that befell 17-year-old TikTok star Sana Yousaf in Islamabad on June 2 is a harrowing reminder of how women’s lives remain expendable in a society that refuses to confront its deep-rooted misogyny or dismantle the structures that allow such violence to thrive.
According to details provided by Islamabad police, a 22-year-old man from Faisalabad, Umar Hayat, was arrested within hours of the murder coming to light through the help of CCTV footage from the vicinity of the victim’s home and geo-fencing technology that helped trace his location. The Islamabad police chief tied the killing to the suspect persistently attempting to befriend Yousaf over several months, advances she repeatedly rejected.
The alleged culprit’s violent reaction to rejection exposes a warped mindset: one that fails to grasp the concepts of consent and female agency, and views women’s autonomy as an affront. It reflects a society where too many men are raised to see dominance as their birthright and ‘no’ as a challenge to be crushed. This begs the question: how many more lives must be lost before Pakistani society finally breaks this cycle of entitlement that turns male fragility into female fatalities?
As reprehensible as Yousaf’s murder was, its aftermath revealed an even deeper societal sickness. Social media became a cesspool of victim-blaming, with young men justifying, and even celebrating the killing, twisting the victim’s social media presence into some perverse justification for her violent end. It was a grotesque display of how violence against women has been normalised, where any female defying patriarchal boundaries is seen as ‘asking for it’. That such depraved rhetoric flows so freely exposes how profoundly broken our moral compass is, with yet another generation of boys being radicalised into viewing women’s lives as disposable.
While the police did well to apprehend the alleged culprit in quick time, this moment demands more than just efficient policing. It requires the authorities to apply the country’s cybercrime statutes — which they were so eager to foist upon the public — against their most legitimate targets: the digital lynch mobs treating a 17-year-old child’s murder as cause for celebration. If cybercrime regulations can be deployed so fervently to silence political dissent, surely they can be used to prosecute those cheering and inciting violence against women.
The fact is that true societal change — the dismantling of toxic patriarchal norms — will take years of education and awareness. But we cannot wait for that distant evolution while women’s lives hang in the balance. The law must act now to punish not just physical violence, but also the online hate that fuels it. Let these tools, so often misused, finally serve what their true purpose should have always been, i.e., protecting the vulnerable.
Recent days have revealed a damning portrait of our decay: child marriage bans spark protests, while dead women are posthumously tried for their own murders. Real change will require a dual reckoning — swift justice for both perpetrators of violence against women and their online enablers, along with an educational overhaul to reshape how young boys perceive women’s autonomy so that this rot is rooted out before it takes hold in another generation. The alternative is tacitly endorsing the next murder of a girl who simply tried living on her own terms.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025