In Pakistan, the deadliest weapon against women isn’t always a gun—it’s language.
Long before a sister is slaughtered in the name of honour, she is wounded by words. Proverbs scold her ambition, metaphors mock her independence, and grammar rewrites her existence in the passive voice. The phrase “larki ho kya?” isn’t mere banter—it is pedagogy. It teaches submission. It authorizes control. It normalizes violence.
Our language doesn’t just reflect misogyny—it performs it. It shrinks girls into silence, cautions them against visibility, and prepares them for disposability. In such a setting, is it any surprise that so-called honour killings continue to be tolerated?
We often look to legal reform as a remedy. Yes, laws matter. Yes, we have passed them—from the 2004 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act to the 2016 anti-honour killing legislation. But the blood hasn’t stopped flowing. Because the law, as legal scholar A. Khan (2020) argues, is not neutral. It inherits the biases of the society that crafts it. Courts still hand down decisions that favour male authority and fail to protect women who dare to live freely.
In Pakistan, honour killings are not a cultural relic—they are a consequence of a worldview still encoded in both our courts and our conversations. Reform must go deeper than the statute books. It must challenge the gendered ideology that lingers in our homes, our humour, and our hashtags.
If we want to end (dis)honour killings, we must first unlearn the language that enables them.
Reference
Khan, A. (2020). ‘Honour’ killings in Pakistan: Judicial and legal treatment of the crime: A feminist perspective. LUMS Law Journal, 7, 74.
