Not love. Not loyalty. Not even the primal bonds of parenthood. In the Pakistan we continue to inhabit-even now, in 2025-the only thing that seems to run thicker than blood is the corrosive cult of “honour.” And that honour, too often, is monstrously believed to reside not in character or courage, but in the subjugated bodies of women and girls.
A three-year-old girl, brutally murdered inside her home in Mansehra. Her “crime”? None. Her mother’s true transgression: daring to choose her own husband. For this act of defiant agency, both mother and child were condemned to pay with their lives.
We might, instinctively, dismiss this as a horrifying aberration. But to do so is to avert our gaze from a stark mirror. ThiAs is not an anomaly; it is a chilling reflection of the enduring, patriarchal violence woven into the fabric of our society. Every few days, the headlines scream of another woman, another girl, another child, harmed, hidden, buried, or burned – all sacrificed at the altar of “family pride.”
These are not crimes born of momentary passion. They are calculated acts of dominion; crimes of power. They stem from a system that still grants men the terrifying entitlement to punish a woman for her inherent agency. A system that brutalizes a child simply because her existence subtly defied someone’s archaic sense of control. A system that perversely redefines a marriage of choice as a crime against culture itself.
Despite years of well-intentioned legal reforms-anti-honour killing laws, robust child protection frameworks, women’s shelter policies-the stark, undeniable truth persists: legislation remains inert where the underlying mindset remains unyielding.
Until our state machinery begins to treat these so-called honour crimes as the premeditated murders they are, not merely “domestic disputes,” justice will remain a hollow symbol. Until every police officer, every prosecutor, and every community leader unequivocally rejects the false moral high ground upon which honour crimes are constructed, perpetrators will continue to kill with lethal impunity.
And until we collectively dismantle the insidious belief that women are mere vessels of family reputation rather than autonomous human beings, the most vulnerable among us will continue to pay the ultimate price.
We may possess the legal instruments to ensure justice takes root, but do we possess the fundamental courage to acknowledge that we continue to let “honour” serve as a grotesque euphemism for cowardice? For absolute control? For cold-blooded murder? Do we truly have the will to translate this much-vaunted protection into tangible reality, and the political resolve to name this violence for precisely what it is: gendered terrorism.
Today, tomorrow, and for however long it takes for our society to finally understand, these pages will thunder with a singular, unwavering truth: There is no honour in murder. Only blood
