By: Dr. Zeeshan Qasim
Few days back, the Chief Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sohail Afridi, sat inside a modest home in Haripur where a five year old girl named Ayat Noor should still have been playing outside the front door. She had gone missing on the tenth of August, snatched from the street just steps from that same door while a neighbour’s boy called her name to lure her toward a waiting car. For fourteen days her father searched the mohalla and its surrounding fields with a desperation only a parent can summon, appearing in a video appeal that circulated across the country, a poor man begging strangers for help finding his child, until the worst was confirmed, her body recovered from a disused well inside a nearby warehouse, the postmortem later showing she had been raped before she died of blood loss and shock. Television cameras caught the Chief Minister twice that day struggling to hold himself together, once speaking to reporters outside the house, his voice cracking as he called what had been done to a five year old being treated “like an animal,” and again inside, when he reached for her father and simply held him, both men in tears, a grief too large for the usual language of a government press release. He handed over a cheque for ten million rupees that nobody in that house had asked for and would have given anything not to need, promised a school and a chowk renamed in her memory, a new child protection law to carry her name, and told her father, in words that needed no polishing, that Ayat Noor had not only been his daughter but everyone’s. A grown man in the second highest office of the province, undone twice on camera by a five year old he had never met, is not a small thing. It is a measure of exactly how far this has gone.
It is worth sitting with that image for a moment before reaching for any explanation, because the explanation is where the discomfort really begins. Nobody is born believing he is entitled to a woman’s body. A newborn boy has no concept of dominance, no theory of ownership over another person’s autonomy, no appetite for control. That belief, when it does take root, is planted, watered and left to grow across years of childhood, mostly in silence, mostly unnoticed, until one day it produces the kind of headline that makes an entire country wince and then, within a week, move on. Pakistan has had rather too many of those headlines lately to keep moving on so easily.
Ayat Noor’s case was not an isolated horror, however singular her name has become on the timelines of a grieving province. In June 2026 alone, a sixteen year old girl in Gujranwala was nearly abducted while walking home with her sisters. In Ghotki, a teenage girl working alongside her parents in a landlord’s field was gang raped, the assault filmed so the family could be blackmailed into silence afterwards. In Karachi, a three-year-old named Kulsoom was raped and murdered, her body delivered to her own doorstep in a flour sack and found by her grandfather. These were not unrelated tragedies scattered across an unlucky season. They were versions of the same story, playing out at different ages, in different provinces, against victims who ranged from a toddler to a labouring teenager, joined only by the fact that someone, somewhere, had absorbed the idea that a girl’s body was his to take.
The scale behind these individual horrors is not a matter of impression or anecdote. It is measured, year on year, by organisations whose entire purpose is to count what the country would often rather not look at directly. Sahil, which monitors violence against children and women in Pakistan, recorded 3,630 child abuse cases across the country in 2025, a figure compiled from newspaper reports in dozens of publications nationwide because official data collection remains so patchy that a charity has had to do the state’s own arithmetic for it. That works out to more than nine children abused every single day. Within that total, 596 cases involved sodomy, 522 involved rape, 195 were attempted rapes, 141 were attempted sodomy, 130 were gang sodomy and 108 were gang rape. The same organisation’s separate tally of violence against women recorded 7,071 cases of gender based violence nationwide in 2025, a rise of 34 per cent over the previous year, of which 877 were rape cases. This is not a country with an occasional problem to manage. It is a country where a one third jump in a single year barely registered as news.
The detail that ought to alarm any parent more than any other single figure in this data is who is doing it. Thirty two per cent of abusers in these cases were acquaintances of the victim, eighteen per cent were strangers, and twelve per cent were husbands, meaning the overwhelming majority of these crimes were committed not by menacing figures lurking in dark alleys but by people the victim, or the victim’s family, already knew and trusted. Children between eleven and fifteen years old were the most vulnerable age group, precisely the years in which a boy’s own understanding of sex, power and entitlement is being formed, mostly outside adult supervision, mostly through whatever he happens to encounter first. And what a great many boys encounter first, in a country where internet access has spread far faster than digital literacy or parental guidance, is pornography, delivered onto a smartphone screen with no context, no consent education and no adult in the room to explain that what is being depicted is neither ordinary nor a template for how to treat a woman.
This is where the conversation needs to move from statistics to homes, because the state’s failures, while real and well documented, are only half of the story. We hand children a device that opens onto the entire unfiltered internet and then pay very little attention to what they do with it. Soft pornography in particular circulates with almost no barrier to entry, arriving unsolicited through the same platforms boys use for cricket highlights and cartoon clips, absorbed without any adult ever sitting down to explain that what a twelve year old is watching bears no relationship whatsoever to consent, mutual respect or how an actual woman wishes to be treated. Left unguided, a boy does not learn nuance from this material. He learns a script, and scripts, once learned early enough, are hard to unlearn.
The home itself, meanwhile, is often teaching its own quieter lesson. A boy who grows up watching his father raise his voice, his hand, or simply his contempt against his mother, while the rest of the household looks away and says nothing, is not merely witnessing an unhappy marriage. He is absorbing a working model of what a man is permitted to do to a woman who cannot leave, a model reinforced by every silence around him precisely because nobody names it, challenges it or teaches him an alternative. Silence, in this context, is not neutral. It is instruction, delivered by omission rather than by word, and boys are remarkably good students of exactly this kind of unspoken lesson.
None of this is offered as an excuse for the men, and increasingly the teenage boys, who commit these crimes. The blame for rape belongs entirely and without qualification to the rapist, and no childhood exposure to pornography or domestic dysfunction absolves an individual of the choice to violate another human being. But responsibility for prevention is a wider circle than responsibility for the crime itself, and pretending otherwise has not made Pakistan any safer. When teenage boys are found to have raped young girls, as has happened with disturbing regularity in the cases Sahil documents each year, that fact alone ought to function as a fire alarm for every parent in the country, not a story to read, wince at and forget by the following morning. A fifteen year old does not develop a rapist’s sense of entitlement in isolation. He develops it in a home, a neighbourhood and a digital environment that either challenged those instincts as they formed or allowed them to harden unopposed.
What would it actually look like to take this responsibility seriously, rather than simply gesture at it in a column and move on. Parents could start treating a child’s internet access the way they already treat matches or the family car, as something powerful enough to need supervision rather than something handed over on a thirteenth birthday and never discussed again. Fathers could model respect rather than domination in front of their sons, while mothers and other family members refuse to let abuse in the home pass in silence, because a boy who watches his mother stand up, be believed and be protected learns a lesson every bit as durable as the one learned by the boy who watches her suffer quietly. Schools could treat consent and respect for women not as an awkward, optional add on to a health class but as a subject worth the same seriousness as arithmetic, because a country that will not teach its sons this lesson deliberately should not be surprised when they learn a worse one by accident. And the reflex, still far too common in Pakistani households, of protecting a family’s reputation over protecting a child, needs to end, given that at least 2,003 child sexual abuse cases were registered across the country according to the same 2025 data, and every serious study of this subject agrees that registered cases are only a fraction of what actually occurs, precisely because so many families choose silence over a police station.
We cannot control every influence that reaches a child, and no parent should be asked to carry the criminal guilt of a crime their son goes on to commit as an adult. But we can, every one of us, ask a harder question than we currently do about what messages we are allowing boys to absorb about women, sex, power and entitlement, and about what we are doing, or quietly failing to do, to interrupt those messages before they calcify into something no lecture can later undo. The rapist alone carries the guilt of the rape. The rest of us carry something else, a responsibility that is no less real for being shared, and Pakistan’s rising numbers suggest it is a responsibility being met, at present, far too rarely and far too late.
