"Our three families used to live in a single home. My uncle’s sons started fighting with us and demanded that we leave the home even though my father was ill in those days. Once my cousins gathered some party workers and started a fight within the home.

“We all were tortured physically and were injured. People living nearby gathered and my uncle demanded that we leave the house.”

“We all got worried. If our blood relations could do this to us, what could we expect from others? Who would provide us protection and security? We have no trust on our relatives. There is no law. Anyone could snatch anything in this kind of a society where people are selfish.”

— Student (female), age 18, from Sindh

Security guards have little protection from attack and have died in large numbers in recent years; their fate often barely noticed in the media coverage that focuses on what happened to the people or property they were protecting. We collected this story from a man who had worked as a security guard for a NATO convoy and was badly injured when it came under attack.

“Suddenly four armed people attacked us with their Kalashnikovs.” After escaping, he managed to walk to the border to ask for help, but he was initially refused any assistance from both soldiers and customs officials.

Only when he struggled further along the border did he find someone who would take him to a hospital in Peshawar. He now “plans to work somewhere where at least my life is not threatened.”

A man says his marriage was happy, but their home was destroyed in the 2005 earthquake and they went to live with relatives. His wife began an affair with his first cousin and threatened to kill herself when he confronted her. She began to beat him and eventually slapped and abused him in front of the Jirga. After a divorce, he remains under treatment for the depression this caused him.

"I have been living a happy life. My husband had a job and our two children brought happiness to our lives. But after some time, militancy and lawlessness started increasing in our area. And then on one unfortunate day, masked men with weapons entered our house and kidnapped my husband.

This event made me go crazy. I could not step out of the house because of fear. I locked up my kids in a room and even closed the ventilators with clay so that no one could see us. I used to scream and faint when I saw police or army in their uniforms. After this painful period of about one and half year, I am now improving. My husband has now been released and I have been provided psychotherapy by an NGO. I pray to God that no one should suffer in life as I have suffered.”

— Homemaker (female), age 27, from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 19th, 2014