Every day, we wake up to examples of countless ways a young girl is quietly kept from embracing her true self and draping herself in the colours of her identity. What often escapes our notice is how a story we conveniently scroll past is somebody’s lived reality, how these realities lie in a profoundly close proximity to us.
In many middle-class suburban and rural pockets of Pakistan, stealing a girl’s identity is often reduced to making her deeply afraid of creating a social media account under her real name—what if my brother found out I’m on Instagram?
Girls as old as seventeen or twenty years, young women on the brink of adulthood, oftentimes have no fear greater than being “caught” using a social application. But what exactly goes on in the mind of a brother when he keeps such a strict eye?
- She might be talking to a guy.
- She might be posting photos of herself, and people might look at her the way I look at girls online.
This is less protection, more projection. And it reveals more about the watcher than the watched.
When a brother is given unnecessary control over his sister and unchecked freedom over his actions, life is not only made hell for his sister but also for the sisters and daughters of others.
There is a woman whom I know—who, back in her early years, came from our village to live with us in the city so she could attend college. There were no colleges back home, and this move was her one chance to study and earn herself a worthy life.
But a man in our extended family, someone much older, now a father himself—took it upon himself to “keep an eye on her”. He would follow her to college every morning to make sure she was actually attending classes and not, in his words, “doing anything else”. She wasn’t his sister. She wasn’t even closely related to him. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was a girl from the village trying to find her footing in the city—and that, somehow, made her everyone’s business.
This story, like many others, isn’t just restricted to a single man’s overreach but stems from a denser cultural reality, the kind where male entitlement speaks nothing but the language of projection. Where a woman’s autonomy has a question mark engraved next to it, and doing something as simple and necessary as pursuing education becomes her punishment. This should remind us that in many households, the line between care and control has been thinned down such that surveillance is disguised as affection, and a girl is expected to live with it.
Constantly checking a sister’s or daughter’s phone, shaping her into a culprit in her own eyes. Not allowing her school trips with the vague excuse of “it’s not safe”, when the fear often tends to run deeper than just her safety. Brothers, in many instances, become the greatest opponents of their sisters’ education, especially despising their pursuing universities because of co-education. Not letting her leave the house without a tightly knotted veil or not allowing her to leave at all—why? Again, control masked as concern.
“I had to visit the NADRA office with my brother to get my ID card renewed; he constantly insisted that I wear a niqaab [veil] or he wouldn’t take me. I was covered from head to toe in a black hijab and abayah. It was scorching hot, and being an asthma patient, only the idea of travelling by bike with a niqaab felt like hell, so I refused. He left me at the door and went away.” – A girl from Gujrat is afraid to have her name mentioned because what if someone found out?
In many households, brothers are encouraged to continue such practices when the family labels this unhealthy control as “love” and “care”. When the idea of “honour” is used as a social construct to control every move of a woman. When even mothers inject constant reminders into their daughter’s consciousness that the family’s “respect” lies in their hands and how one single mistake from their end could ruin the entire household. This doesn’t just crush them under the weight of a myriad of expectations set for them from an unrealistically young age but also distorts their idea of self-worth, burns their ambitions and creativity and blurs their sense of belonging.
When each day comes with new reports of an honour killing, it should be noted that these practices massively root from the above-discussed settings. How girls are often silenced forever when they resort to rebellion and refusal, rejecting the lives forcibly imposed on them. How their vulnerability is taken advantage of by many other men, and a simple “no” becomes the end of their lives. How almost every girl is at risk of becoming just another Qandeel Baloch or Sana Yousuf.
