There was nothing honourable about the bullet that tore through 17-year-old Sana Yousaf’s body in Islamabad. And nothing isolated about a killing that, though it took place in the capital, echoes a long, bloodied tradition stretching from tribal jirgas to university dorms: when a woman exercises choice, she is marked for death.
Sana, a rising social media voice, a bright medical student who had just celebrated her birthday, was reportedly gunned down in her own home by a man whose romantic advances she had repeatedly rejected. He was neither her father, brother, nor husband. But in the twisted calculus of patriarchal entitlement, her refusal was reason enough.
Some media reports describe this incident as a “crime of passion,” a term that adds an air of romanticism where there is none. This was not love gone wrong. It was premeditated violence, an assertion of control thinly disguised as honour. And it is far from rare.
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, more than 340 people were murdered in the name of honour in 2024 alone. War Against Rape believes the real number easily exceeds 1,000 annually, as countless cases go unreported or misclassified. We have grown so accustomed to these deaths that unless the victim is well-known, their story barely registers. However, we would be better off realising that each of these so-called honour killings is a public execution, carried out with the quiet complicity of families, communities, and too often, the state.
The reaction to Sana’s death only made this even clearer. A disturbingly vocal segment of social media users celebrated her murder, suggesting that her identity as a “TikToker” somehow justified it. This repugnant victim-blaming, a familiar reflex in Pakistan, shifts blame from the killer to the victim’s perceived morality.
In 2016, the murder of Qandeel Baloch, the original digital disruptor, prompted the Parliament to act. The Anti-Honour Killing Bill was passed, closing the legal loophole that allowed family members to “forgive” the perpetrator. Yet eight years later, Qandeel’s brother walks free. The law is not broken; it is merely bypassed. Prosecutors often fail to establish motive, whether deliberately or through ineptitude, and courts treat these murders as private disputes rather than crimes against the state.
What killed Sana was not just a man with a gun. It was a culture that taught boys they were owed submission and girls that refusal is fatal. A society where the fragile male ego dictates life and death. As one commentator put it: men in Pakistan have a “men problem.”
In her death, Sana holds up a mirror to Pakistan. Because a country where daughters must die to preserve their families’ names is not gripped by honour. It is gripped by rot.
