Hina Javed had been married for nine months when an emergency call sent her brother racing to an Askari Apartments flat in Rawalpindi. At 7:23 pm, he found his sister dead in the washroom. Police say a wire was fastened around her neck and tied to the shower rod, and the initial postmortem recorded a strangulation mark, an injury below her right lip and bleeding. A Rawalpindi magistrate has placed her husband and domestic servant in three days of police custody. Meanwhile, the Punjab Forensic Science Agency must still determine the final cause of death. It goes without saying that the investigation must establish responsibility.
These details will live with Hina’s family long after the story leaves the headlines. A bathroom. A shower rod. A brother arriving too late. The men in custody are entitled to a fair investigation. Still, Hina is entitled to one whose evidence is not allowed to fray beneath family pressure, money or influence.
For too many women in our society, the place where they are least safe is the place to which they are told to return. “Ghar ki baat” is an old phrase that turns terror inside a home into a matter for elders to settle. Sahil’s six-month record this year found that 54 per cent of reported gender-based violence occurred in victims’ own homes. There is a universe of suffering outside those figures. Pakistan has no dedicated national survey on violence against women. Its latest demographic survey found that 34 per cent of ever-married women had suffered spousal physical, sexual or emotional violence, while 56 per cent of women who had experienced physical or sexual violence had never sought help or told anyone. Silence is not consent. Often, it is the price of dependence, children, family honour, financial fear and the knowledge that a complaint may still lead nowhere.
Punjab’s own numbers show the cruelty of that last calculation. In 2024, police said 59,798 domestic-violence complaints had reached the Virtual Women Police Station after its launch. Only 3,365 became FIRs. Six per cent. Consider what that means in a frightened woman’s life.
Rawalpindi was among the districts that later failed to provide Right-to-Information data on violence against women. It is easier to mourn a woman after death than to count the women asking for protection before it.
Pakistan has learnt women’s names in this dreadful way before. Noor Mukadam. Sarah Inam. Noor was tortured and beheaded in an F-7 residence. In June, the Supreme Court dismissed Zahir Jaffer’s review petition and maintained his death sentence. Sarah was killed at an Islamabad farmhouse, and her husband was sentenced to death at trial in 2023. Their families carried their daughters’ names through police stations, courtrooms and years of public scrutiny. Hina’s family has just begun that journey.
Once evidence identifies the guilty, a court must make an example of them through a conviction that survives appeal and a sentence that no private arrangement can erase.
