The disappearance of Eshal Fatima from her home in Jhang began with an ordinary errand. Accounts differ on her purpose: some say a college errand to collect a roll-number slip, while her father's FIR claims a shopping trip to Multan arranged through a neighbor. Four days later, her family received a phone call informing them she was in the hospital. She died there, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, the uncertainty reflecting how little care is taken for women lost in such circumstances.
What followed was not grief but argument. Within a day, the country split into committees over her body. Her father's complaint alleged abduction and assault, while a preliminary post-mortem found no evidence of either and mentioned she had diabetes for years. A loud section of the internet decided it was all a performance, calling it a hoax or a drama staged for sympathy. The forensic doubt that should have brought humility was instead used as a verdict: she made it up. A dead teenager was recast as a liar who wasted the nation's afternoon.
I want to be more careful than the internet was. I do not know what happened to Eshal Fatima in those four days, and neither does anyone shouting about her. That uncertainty deserves respect. But watch what the country did with it: half convicted her of lying, the other half convicted her of being the sort of girl it happens to. Almost nobody waited.
Consider another case this month, in Lahore. An eighteen-year-old maid who cleaned a house in Model Town stated in writing and on video, before she died, that the owner's son and the family driver had been raping her for months. She became pregnant. The household kept it quiet and took her to a clinic in Raiwind for an abortion, which led to complications that killed her. In her final statement, only the driver remained; the son vanished from the accusation. Her father says she was pressured. The son was granted bail. She did what women are told to do: spoke on camera while dying and named them. It bought her nothing, because the machinery that decides a woman's word is worth had already priced hers at zero.
To their credit, many refused the script. Hadiqa Kiani, Sabeena Farooq, Momina Iqbal, Mishi Khan, and other actresses and singers used their large followings to demand that it matters. Momina Iqbal predicted victim-blaming in advance, and comment sections proved her right. Mahira Khan asked where the men are, not the accused, but the decent ones who say nothing. That silence is the real subject, where the country keeps its honest opinion.
Scroll under any of these stories, and you find what people believe when they think they are talking only to each other. One comment beneath a post about the Jhang girl, written by a boy under twenty, suggested that being gang-raped was something she secretly wanted. He was not removed; he was liked. Others agreed. A child born years after the first such case has learned to look at a dead girl and find his sympathy drifting toward the men.
Look at the Karachi case: a sixty-four-year-old man beat his fifty-eight-year-old wife to death with an iron rod because she would not sleep with him, then confessed so calmly that the officer thought it was a prank. Yet underneath the news sat rationalizations: men explaining that a wife who refuses is failing in a duty, that he must have been provoked, that we do not know the whole story. A man confesses to murder, and a section of the country reaches first for his defense.
It is tempting to file the killer and the commenter as different species. They run on the same fuel: both look at an injured woman and reach for a reason it is not what it appears, not quite his fault, not quite worth the noise. One reaches with his hands, the other with his thumbs. The second man is not harmless, because the boy typing that she wanted it is drafting the acquittal the next one will stand on, in a courtroom or drawing room, when his turn comes.
That part frightens me more than the crimes. The crimes are appalling but committed by relatively few. A crowd holds this mentality, and it is getting younger. I used to comfort myself that this would age out, that the uncles would pass and take the worst with them. Then I started reading comments, and the cruelty was coming from teenagers, casual and fluent, performing for an audience that rewarded them. We did not merely fail to break the inheritance; we passed it down with an upgrade: a megaphone, a live audience, a scoreboard of likes.
So when people ask where this is heading, the honest answer is that it is already here and younger than us. The girls are reading every word, on the same phones, watching a country decide in real time whether a dead seventeen-year-old was a victim, a liar, or an embarrassment, watching it write post-mortems for the girls and defenses for the men. The lesson they take is not the one we pretend to teach about being careful. Careful did not save the maid who named her rapists on camera while dying. The real lesson is colder: whether you are believed has little to do with what you did and almost everything to do with what a crowd has already decided you are.
