There is a moment in every society when violence stops appearing as an exception and begins to feel like grammar.
In Pakistan, that moment does not announce itself through spectacle alone. It is embedded in something quieter, more routine, and therefore more dangerous: the linguistic choices through which violence is narrated, softened, and eventually absorbed into normality. Who is named? Who disappears? Who is to blame? And who is erased without ever being grammatically present?
What begins as individual brutality is gradually transformed into socially acceptable descriptions such as "domestic dispute,” “family matter,” or “killed for honor."These are not neutral phrases. They are interpretive frames that reorganize responsibility, dilute agency, and convert violence into explanation.
Violence, in this sense, is not only enacted in physical space. It is reproduced in discourse.
Feminist discourse analysis shows that language does not merely describe violence; it distributes accountability. From the perspective of Teun van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model, repeated linguistic patterns shape collective mental structures. Societies learn what to consider normal, private, or understandable through the language they repeatedly consume. When headlines read “woman killed in domestic incident,” the event is registered without an agent. The crime becomes atmospheric rather than attributable.
Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis further demonstrates how institutional language naturalizes hierarchy through grammar itself. Passive constructions such as “she was killed” remove the actor from the sentence. The perpetrator disappears before legal or moral responsibility is even demanded. Sara Mills’ feminist discourse analysis deepens this insight by showing how women are frequently positioned as objects of narration rather than subjects of agency. They are spoken about, not speaking; described, not defining.
The result is what can be called linguistic laundering: violence is narrated in ways that make it culturally readable, even when it is morally indefensible.
These patterns do not begin at the moment of violence. They are cultivated long before, in the slow repetition of everyday language. School textbooks, media content, and household idioms construct a stable gender hierarchy that precedes physical harm. Boys are framed as strong, rational, and protective; girls as obedient, modest, and domestic. This is not simply representation. It is training in perception.
When a child repeatedly hears phrases such as “izzat ka khayal karo” or “aurat paon ki jooti hai,” language ceases to describe reality and begins to prescribe it. It teaches not only what women are but also what can be done to them in the name of honor, discipline, or control. By the time violence occurs, the interpretive conditions for its acceptance have already been prepared.
Pakistan’s legal framework has begun to name what was once left unnamed. The Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act, 2020, expanded the definition of violence beyond physical harm to include psychological, emotional, sexual, and economic abuse and empowered courts to issue protection orders, residence orders, and financial relief. It signals a shift from silence toward recognition.
Yet law operates within a broader ecosystem of interpretation and enforcement. A legal text may define violence precisely, but without institutional will, trained enforcement, and survivor-centered mechanisms, its force remains largely symbolic. In Pakistan’s gendered reality, law often speaks more clearly than it acts.
To treat femicide as a series of isolated incidents is to misunderstand its structure. Across contexts, the killing of women follows a recognizable logic: female autonomy is reframed as disruption, and disruption is often met with violence. Whether framed as "honor," domestic control, or intimate partner aggression, the pattern remains consistent: control is normalized, resistance is punished, and accountability is diluted.
High-profile cases such as Qandeel Baloch illustrate how "honor" functions less as a cultural explanation and more as a moral technology that converts domination into justification. Globally, this grammar intensifies in conditions of inequality, weak institutions, and social instability, but its structure remains disturbingly consistent.
Any serious analysis must resist reduction. Cultural relativism cannot justify harm, but neither can abstraction erase context. Similarly, while men are statistically the primary perpetrators of gender-based violence, meaningful change requires engagement rather than exclusion. The issue is not a gender war. It is structural imbalance.
And structures are sustained not by individuals alone, but by language, institutions, and repetition.
If violence is sustained through law, culture, psychology, and language, then resistance must operate across the same domains. Legal reform must ensure swift accountability and eliminate procedural dilution. Educational systems must dismantle gender hierarchies rather than reproduce them. Media institutions must abandon passive framing and explicitly name responsibility. Economic structures must reduce dependency that produces vulnerability. And international cooperation must address trafficking and transnational exploitation with coordinated urgency.
But perhaps the most fundamental reform is less visible than all of these: it is the reform of language itself. Because societies do not only commit violence, they also teach how to perceive it.
Femicide is not only a crisis of governance or enforcement. It is the culmination of multiple systems that render violence thinkable, explainable, and narratively survivable.
The question, therefore, is not only how many women are killed, but how easily those deaths are absorbed into passive explanation.
To dismantle femicide is to dismantle the grammar that sustains it.
A society that cannot name violence with precision will always struggle to confront it with conviction.
And a society that continues to obscure responsibility in its language will continue to reproduce it in its life.
I am still burning. Still bleeding. And I refuse to be silent.
How does a father raise his hand against the daughter who once reached for him in trust? How does a brother become the destroyer of the sister who once saw him as protection? How does a husband transform from partner into executioner within the very home he once promised to safeguard?
Something has fractured in our moral world when love mutates so easily into control, and control into violence.
And yet the deeper fracture is not only in the act but also in the response. When broken women reach for justice, they are too often met not with protection, but with delay, dismissal, or indifference.
In the end, discourse and law, grammar and governance, all collapse into something more elemental: the silence left behind after violence has spoken.
What remains cannot be fully contained in analytical categories or policy language. It is the lived reality of vulnerability in spaces where protection is absent, where justice arrives late or not at all, and where human life is continuously negotiated against structures of neglect, power, and indifference.
It is in this space that suffering takes on a stark clarity: not as an abstraction, but as a presence. Lives are reduced to exposure, dignity to fragility, and survival to endurance within conditions that should never have been normalized.
The following poem is included not as ornament but as witness, an attempt to register, in another form of language, what formal discourse struggles to hold.
جاں بلب (نظم)
— ریاض لغاری
Mourning in the Desert
In its silence, it reflects not aesthetic closure but a continuing reality: that the question is not only how violence is described but also how long it is allowed to persist in conditions where protection remains partial, and accountability remains uneven.
