THIRTEEN years ago, a young woman was gang-raped on a moving bus in Delhi, assaulted with a rod, and left to die. The case became a generational reckoning. Mass protests. New laws. The death penalty, eventually, for four of her attackers. The world watched India promise itself it would never let this happen again.

It happened again — and again. Last month, in a village in Bihar’s Begusarai district, a mother of four was gang-raped in her own home, assaulted with objects, one of which — a bullet casing — she carried to the hospital herself as evidence because no one else seemed inclined to look for it. According to the BBC, her husband said police initially refused to file a complaint. A private clinic turned her away. It took days, and her own collapsing body, before anyone treated what had happened to her as the emergency it was.

I confess to a kind of foolishness. I had let myself believe that executing the culprits in 2020 meant something had shifted — that fear, finally, had been instilled where it needed to be. It hadn’t. More than 30,000 rape cases are still recorded in India every year. Most go unreported. The ones that surface do so not because the system worked, but because something about them — a video, a bullet casing, a particularly grotesque detail — broke through the numbness.

Pakistan has its own version of this same, exhausting lesson — most recently, the years it took the Supreme Court to exhaust Zahir Jaffer’s appeals for beheading Noor Mukadam in 2021.

Anti-rape laws exist. But the crime doesn’t stop.

Even as I write this, the list keeps growing. A three-year-old girl was found dead in Karachi, hours after she went missing while playing outside her home; police have confirmed evidence of sexual assault. Weeks earlier, in Jhang, a 17-year-old first-year college student was abducted, gang-raped, and died after being brought to a hospital unconscious. The investigations for both are still underway.

That gap between what the law promises and what it delivers is not the exception. It is the rule.

At a Senate human rights committee hearing last November, the national conviction rate for gender-based violence was put at around five per cent. In certain categories, it falls to 0.5pc. For domestic violence, 1.3pc.

These are not the numbers of a system struggling at the margins. They are the numbers of a system that does not, in any meaningful sense, prosecute this category of crime. Pakistan has the laws. It does not have the follow-through.

So, it should not have surprised me to read what happened this week when a woman in Karachi described, in a Facebook post, being threatened with rape at her own front door.

She had ordered groceries. The delivery rider later called, said he was in debt, asked for money. She declined to keep taking his calls. The next morning he showed up at her house, banged on her door, and sent her a message threatening rape. She had been fully covered when she answered her door the day before — head to toe, as she put it, anticipating exactly the question that was coming.

The question came anyway. In the comments under her post, the conversation did not settle on the man who had threatened her. It settled on her. The interrogation of her choices began almost instantly, with more energy and more specificity than anything directed at the man who had threatened to rape her for refusing to pay him.

It would be easy to call this a Pakistan problem, or an India problem — to draw the borders tight enough that the rot stays on the other side of them. That instinct, the othering, the quiet relief of ‘this isn’t us’, is its own kind of denial. It lets a society look at a number like 5pc and feel implicated by nothing.

But the pattern doesn’t respect borders. A mother in Begusarai is failed by a police station that won’t file her complaint. A woman in Karachi is failed by a comment section that interrogates her instead of the man banging on her door. Two countries, two languages, two entirely different incidents — and the same reflex, doing the same work: move the question away from what he did, and onto what she should have done differently to deserve not having it done to her.

I don’t think hanging four men in Delhi fixed this. I don’t think one upheld death sentence in Islamabad fixes it either. Punishment, when it finally lands, can look like justice and still leave the machinery that failed to prevent the crime completely untouched. None of that requires a verdict to fix. It requires someone to stop asking why she opened the door, and start asking why we keep needing her to explain that she did.

The writer conducts writing workshops in Karachi.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, June 28th, 2026