I used to think the hardest part of being a parent was letting go. The first day of school, the first van ride alone, the first time they go to a friend's house, and you have to sit with the quiet. But I was wrong. The hardest part is realising, somewhere between one news bulletin and the next, that you never really know if they will be safe.
Eshal Fatima was a 17-year-old first-year college student from Jhang who stepped out on 4 June to pick up clothes from a tailor. She was gone for three days. Her family received an anonymous call on 7 June, telling them her condition had deteriorated and that she was at a private hospital. By the time they arrived, police had already shifted her to DHQ Hospital, where emergency treatment began, but she didn't make it.
Three young men have been arrested, and a female facilitator has also been detained. The forensic picture is still incomplete, but what is not incomplete is this: she left home and did not come back. That's the part that sits in my chest like something heavy and permanent.
We've been here before, of course. We keep being here. Zainab was seven years old when she went to her Quran class in Kasur, and her body was found five days later at a rubbish disposal site. The autopsy found she had been raped and strangled. Her killer turned out to be a neighbour who had joined the protests after her death.
The rage that erupted in Kasur was the rage of people who already knew the system was indifferent and were finally done pretending otherwise. The case led to Pakistan's first national child safety law, the Zainab Alert Bill, which mandates legal action against officials who delay investigating a missing child case beyond two hours. Eight years later, Eshal's family waited.
They initially didn't even file a report, thinking perhaps she'd return.
That's the thing nobody says out loud. Parents of girls in this country learn a particular kind of silence. You don't make noise because making noise invites scrutiny. You don't report too quickly because being reported changes how your daughter is perceived forever, sometimes before anyone has even looked for her. The system has trained us to hesitate at the exact moment we should be screaming.
Fear is a tax we pay constantly, and nobody ever asks whether the burden is fair
According to Sahil's Cruel Numbers 2024 report, 3,364 child abuse cases were reported across Pakistan last year: nine children abused every day. And that's the reported figure. God knows what the actual number is. It gets really dark because the conviction rate in nearly all categories is less than one per cent. Less than one per cent! Let that sit. All that courage, all those First Information Reports, all those medical examinations and public humiliations in the name of procedure... for less than one per cent.
There is something almost colonial about how this works. The British built a police structure in this subcontinent designed to manage populations, not protect them. The job was surveillance, not service for the Indian people. We inherited that architecture whole, painted it green and white, and left mostly the same people in charge of the same machinery. When a girl goes missing in Jhang, the same questions get asked first: Where was she going? Who was she with?
I think about this as a mother in a particular way. You raise a daughter in Pakistan, and you are always doing two things at once. You're raising her confidence, dreams, and sense of herself as a person who deserves space in the world. And you're simultaneously, quietly, desperately shrinking that world to keep her safe inside it. Don't go here, don't trust that. Come home before dark.
And for many girls, the dark comes anyway, in broad daylight, with someone they thought they knew.
The psychological damage landed on every girl in that city who heard the news and recalculated her own movements. It lands on every mother who watched the coverage and added another item to the mental list of impossible precautions. Fear is a tax we pay constantly, and nobody ever asks whether the burden is fair.
What we are producing, generation after generation, is a society that is very good at mourning and very bad at changing. We trend hashtags and hold vigils. The Zainab Alert Bill, passed in 2019, mandated that cases involving children be resolved within three months and required immediate alerts to be relayed via mobile networks and the media. On paper, the architecture of protection exists. On the ground, a 17-year-old is still missing for three days before anyone outside her circle even knows to look.
Families with resources hire lawyers on day one. They know which District Police Officer to call, which media contact applies pressure. But Eshal's family was from Sultan Colony, and Zainab's family were ordinary too. Poor families in Pakistan lose children to a justice system priced out of their reach. I keep returning to something simple. Eshal left to collect clothes, the kind of errand you don't think twice about. And that ordinariness is where the loss really lives, in the fact that ordinary life is not safe. Not for our daughters. Not yet.
We are told to be resilient. Pakistan ki aurat bohat mazboot hoti hai. Strong, yes. But I am tired of strength being offered as a substitute for safety. My daughter should not have to be strong to collect her clothes from a tailor. She should just be able to go.