I HAVE been watching an American television show called Furious. It is about two women on opposite sides of the law. One is a former police officer named Alice who reported her violent boyfriend to their department. The department turned on her, not him. The other is a woman named Catherine who kills men. Men with money, men with records, men with connections that kept them untouchable. The show does not ask you to approve of Catherine. It asks you to notice that by the time she picked up the needle, every system that should have intervened had already left the room.

It is remarkably good television. The writer clearly understands something that most crime dramas do not. It’s not who did it; it is what happened before. What trail existed? Who saw it? Who could have stopped it? And why the answer to that last question is almost always nobody, or nobody who mattered.

There is a scene in which an older sex crimes detective, Nora, delivers a monologue by a hospital bed about what years of watching children abused has done to her. “You think you’re ever going to catch anyone who matters?” she says.

It is not a question. It is a diagnosis.

Name, hashtag, outrage, silence, name. The loop does not break.

I was watching this when I read about Hina Javed.

Hina was married for nine months. She was found in a bathroom in Rawalpindi with her hands tied behind her back and a cloth over her mouth. Suspects were arrested. But as with so many cases, the questions that followed were not just about what happened in that bathroom. They were about what was known before, and what was not acted on.

I should have felt outrage. I felt recognition.

This is what is left after years of hashtags and celebrity Instagram stories and tagging chief ministers in posts that ask them to act “not as a politician, but as a woman”. The outrage cycle is so familiar now that I can map it before it begins. A woman

dies. A name trends. Celebrities share the family’s letter. Someone tags Maryam Nawaz. An Instagram justice page gains 3,000 followers. Then we move on, until the next name.

I referred to my 2020 column about women’s anger. I had quoted Rebecca Traister, who argued that anger has connective power, that it can be channelled into structural change. I had also quoted Brittney Cooper, who wrote that the quickest way to discredit a woman is to call her angry. I believed then that something was shifting. Women journalists had signed a petition against online harassment. Aurat March was growing. Women were organising.

Six years later, I am not sure what was built. The petition did not produce a mechanism. The march still happens and still meets the same resistance. Online abuse of women journalists is worse, not better. And another woman was found dead in a bathroom with her hands tied.

The show is called Furious. I am something past furious. The numbness is not indifference. It is the thing that happens when you have watched the same sequence enough times to know where it ends. Name, hashtag, outrage, silence, name. The loop does not break because it was never designed to.

In the show, Catherine kills because she concluded that nothing else was on offer. Alice stays inside the system and is punished for it. Nora stays and is hollowed out by it. Three women, three responses to the same failure. None of them produces safety. The show is honest enough to say so.

In Pakistan, we have a fourth response. We post. We share. We tag. We write columns. I am writing one now. I know it will not save the next Hina. I know that the next case will also have a trail that should have mattered, and that the outrage when it surfaces will also be sincere and also be useless.

So what would it take?

Not fury. We have had fury. What we have never had is a system that treats a harassment complaint at the workplace as information that matters beyond that workplace.

We have never had a mechanism that connects a pattern of complaints to a warning before a marriage. We have never had a bureaucracy that treats violence against women as a problem to be solved with procedure rather than a tragedy to be responded to with speeches.

Nora’s line keeps coming back to me. You think you’re ever going to catch anyone who matters? In Pakistan the question is simpler. You think you’re ever going to stop anyone before it matters?

I will finish the show. I expect it will not answer the question either. That is the difference between good fiction and bad reality. Fiction is allowed to leave the question open. Reality is not supposed to, but does.

The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2026