A seven-year-old girl in Sargodha went to a nearby shop to buy sugar a few days ago. She never returned home. She was raped and murdered. The nation mourned. People shared sad messages online. Politicians condemned the crime. Television channels called for justice. Everyone suddenly remembered that she was a human being, and the state had a responsibility. But one question remains more frightening than the crime itself: What if she had survived? If that were the case, many of the same people grieving her today might have wished she hadn’t lived.
A Society That Punishes Survivors
This title exists not because death is a blessing, nor because a murdered child is lucky. It highlights a society that often punishes survivors more than it punishes those who hurt them. The rapist would have attacked her once. Society might have tried to make her relive that experience for the rest of her life. Today, everyone calls her innocent. If she had survived, many would forget her innocence and remember only the crime. She would no longer be a child. She would have become “the raped girl.” A name overshadowed by tragedy. An identity lost to a single incident. A future rewritten by someone else’s violence.
Who Carries the Shame?
A man commits the crime. The victim carries the shame. A predator destroys a childhood. Society wonders whether the child’s “honor” has been lost. Honor? What honor can a criminal take from an innocent child? If your sense of honor can be shattered by violence against a victim, then it was never right to begin with. The impurity belongs to the rapist. The shame belongs to the rapist. The disgrace belongs to the rapist. Yet somehow, we look away from the guilty and focus on the innocent. We whisper. We stare. We pity. We define. We reduce a living human being to the worst thing done to her. And then we call it sympathy.
That is another form of cruelty. Pity that strips away a person’s identity is not compassion. It is violence dressed up politely. If she had survived, people might have asked questions no child should ever face. “Will she ever live a normal life?” “Who will marry her?” “What will people say?” Notice something horrifying: the conversation quietly leaves the criminal behind and centers on the victim. The rapist becomes yesterday’s news. The survivor becomes tomorrow’s burden.
How Society Participates in Violence
This is how societies participate in violence without ever touching the victim. Not with fists. With words. Not with weapons. With silence. Not with blood. With stigma. Sometimes, the pressure to protect “honor” is so strong that even those closest to a survivor can be overcome by fear of gossip. Instead of helping her heal, they may start to shield her from the world, treating her as fragile, damaged, or defined by the incident. Their intentions may be protective, but this can add another layer of suffering. A child who has already lived through one nightmare should never have to face another created by those around her.
We say rape is a crime. But we act as if surviving rape is a lifelong sentence. A rapist violates a body once. Society can violate a person’s dignity for decades. Every whisper says, “You are no longer the same.” Every stare says, “We remember.” Every silence says, “Your life will always be measured by this.” And then we wonder why so many survivors hide, stay silent, or fear speaking out.
The Biggest Lie About Honor
The biggest lie our society tells is that rape steals a girl’s honor. It does not. Honor does not exist in a child’s body. Honor lives in the character of human beings. A rapist cannot take the innocence of the innocent. He only reveals the corruption of the guilty. Every person who treats a survivor as if she is “less” shows something about themselves—not about her.
So this title is not written for the little girl. It is written for us. It is for everyone who has ever looked at a survivor with suspicion instead of support. For every family that cared more about “what people will say” than about what their daughter needed. For every neighbor who turned a victim into gossip. For every community that demanded strength from a broken child while asking nothing from the men who harmed her.
Protecting the Living
The real measure of a society is not how loudly it mourns its dead daughters. It is how fiercely it protects its living ones. Until a survivor can walk through our streets without whispers, through her home without shame, and through her future without carrying the burden of someone else’s crime, we should stop congratulating ourselves on our morality. Because the true obscenity is not just that monsters exist. It is that, too often, we create a world where survivors must keep proving they still deserve dignity. The rapist commits one crime. The rest of us must decide whether we will keep committing the next thousand.
