Murder, Made Acceptable

In June, in Islamabad, a young girl of 16 was shot dead. It sparked a nationwide outcry.

Her name was Sana Yousuf, a TikToker, a content creator, and an artiste in her own right. As is the norm in our moral panic economy, people rushed not to mourn her, but to dissect her choices. Her digital presence, her confidence, her lifestyle - everything became ammunition in the court of public opinion.

The 22-year-old man who killed her allegedly did it because she refused his advances and turned him down. As simple as the whole ordeal can be summarised into one sentence, nothing about its mechanics is as simple. In the aftermath, one fine, harrowing question must linger in our collective consciousness: What really killed Sana Yousuf?

Sana’s murder is not an isolated incident. It brings to light a chilling and consistent pattern of gendered violence that is both pervasive and routinely dismissed. From Qandeel Baloch to Noor Mukadam, each case is met with temporary outrage and then quietly absorbed into the country’s culture of normalized brutality.

“Masculine domination is so anchored in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it,” says French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Violence against women is not merely a law and order failure but a sociological syndrome - a symptom of larger anxieties about autonomy, identity, and power. While it is tempting to cast these crimes in simplistic binaries of male aggressors and female victims, such narratives risk perpetuating gender war rhetoric without probing the full complexity. This isn’t about men versus women. It’s about the roles our families, schools, media, and peer groups play in shaping how both boys and girls internalize ideas of power and worth. It’s a collective failure in teaching emotional resilience, mutual respect, and ethical citizenship. When young people are denied the tools to process rejection, disappointment, or difference, some turn to violence. In a world that offers boys power but denies them permission to be vulnerable, rejection can feel like humiliation, and humiliation, when fused with entitlement, is combustible.

At the same time, it is important to understand that the same culture that shames girls for speaking is the one that mocks boys for feeling. This duality is not a coincidence - it’s systemic conditioning. The same gender norms that stifle female expression also teach boys to disassociate from empathy. And that disconnect, nurtured by humour, media, and silence, becomes dangerous long before it becomes violent. It is what our social fabric is designed to overlook. It is this strange, innate reassurance that comes from y ears and years of casual sexism disguised as mere quips. The jokes that tell boys early on that a woman’s ‘no’ is a challenge, not a boundary. It stands true for how quickly we look the other way.