Gender Violence

5 Times Malala has Owned her Critics

Reprinted from the Islamic Monthly.  One would have thought that a 15-year-old girl shot in the head for speaking out in favor of education for girls would be hailed as a hero. Unfortunately, there is no dearth of people who have scathingly criticized Malala Yousafzai. Yousafzai makes many Pakistanis proud…

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Zainab Ansari and Pakistan’s Stolen Children

December 1999: A man sent a letter to the Lahore Police confessing to the murder of a hundred children. Following an unsuccessful manhunt (the largest  in Pakistan’s history) the man surrendered himself at the offices of Pakistan’s best known newspaper. Between 1985 and 1999, Javed Iqbal Mughal had abducted, sodomized and murdered…

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Where There is Ruin, Treasure Awaits

We live in a time when good days are hard to find. Each morning, it appears as if the world fell apart a little more overnight.  The Rohingya genocide looms. Yemeni children continue to starve. And American democracy dangles on the slender threads of Presidential tweets. Then, there are stories…

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#MeToo and Misplaced Feminism

The vast majority of women are familiar with a certain sinking feeling. That feeling like you’ve been punched in the gut, coupled with horror and fear.  We know the shaky feeling you get when someone takes a good, long look at you from top to bottom, undressing you with their eyes….

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