HINA Javed was 45 years old and had been married for nine months when she was found dead in the washroom of her home in Rawalpindi, her hands tied behind her back. According to the FIR filed by her brother, her husband, father-in-law and a domestic worker were accused of her murder. Her brother also alleged that Hina had been subjected to severe violence by her spouse.

Every time a case like this breaks, the same reflex follows: shock that the accused was “educated”, a professor no less, someone who had presumably spent years reading, teaching and working at one of the country’s top institutions. The implication is always the same: surely a man like this should have known better. Surely more schooling, more literacy and more exposure to modern ideas would have made him less likely to be violent.

It is time we retired that assumption. It is not just simplistic; it can distract us from the work that actually needs to be done.

A degree is not a character certificate.

A degree, on its own, does not teach a man to see a woman as his equal.

Pakistani research paints a more complicated picture than the comforting assumption that education protects women from violence. A recent analysis of the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey found that while both women’s and husbands’ education appeared associated with intimate partner violence at one stage of the analysis, neither remained independently significant after other factors were taken into account. Instead, factors such as marital control, knowledge of parental violence and a husband’s use of alcohol were among those significantly associated with intimate partner violence.

Education can matter. But it is not a guarantee against abuse. A man can spend 16 years in formal education, earn a doctorate and lecture at a prestigious university, and still carry into his marriage beliefs about entitlement, control and women’s autonomy that education alone has never challenged.

Violence is not simply an intellectual deficiency. Information alone does not dismantle it. It is often rooted in a moral and emotional architecture shaped long before university: by ideas about masculinity, anger, entitlement, control and what women are expected to endure.

Hina Javed’s case is horrifying, but violence against women in Pakistan is not an aberration. A nationally representative analysis of the 2017-18 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey found that 33.48 per cent of ever-married women aged 15 to 49 had experienced emotional, physical or sexual violence by a current or most recent husband. Pakistan also ranked last among 148 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Index.

These are not the numbers of a society that can afford to assume that educating men is enough. They are the numbers of a society that must think more seriously about how boys are raised, how violence is normalised and how warning signs are ignored.

So what does prevention look like, if degrees and professional status are not reliable indicators of safety? It looks like starting decades earlier than a marriage certificate or a professorship: in the home, in early childhood, in the small daily lessons boys absorb about anger, entitlement and control long before anyone calls it ‘gender education’.

A boy learns what is acceptable in his treatment of women by observing the relationships around him, by noticing whether his sisters’ opinions carry weight at the dinner table, and by seeing whether other men are ever held accountable when they cross a line. Much of this is not taught in a lecture hall. It is taught, or mistaught, in the ordinary texture of childhood.

This means the intervention has to move upstream: into parenting, into how schools respond to boys’ behaviour towards girls from an early age, and into the media and other social institutions that shape ideas of masculinity.

It also means taking reports of abuse seriously before violence becomes fatal. The larger problem extends beyond this one case. Violence within a marriage is often treated as a private matter until it becomes impossible to ignore. By then, it may be too late.

None of this is an argument against educating men. Education remains valuable for a hundred reasons. But we need to stop confusing credentials with character. A degree tells us what someone has studied, not how he treats his wife. A profession can establish expertise, but it cannot establish emotional maturity, respect for another person’s autonomy or freedom from violent behaviour.

Yet we routinely confuse credentials with character. We look at a man’s degree, profession, salary and family background and allow these markers of respectability to stand in for something they cannot establish. Respectability becomes a shorthand for safety.

Hina Javed deserved better than a society that waits until a woman is found dead before asking whether there were signs that something was wrong. Preventing the next such death does not start in a university classroom. It starts much earlier: in a nursery, at a dinner table and in the way boys watch the men around them treat women.

Degrees can open doors. They can create opportunities. They can produce doctors, lawyers, professors and professionals. But a degree, on its own, does not teach a man to see a woman as his equal. And until we stop mistaking education for decency, we will keep being shocked by violence we should have learned to recognise long before it becomes a headline.

The writer is a lawyer and an LLM candidate at Lums.

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2026