Pakistan’s obsession with the “perfect" victim

Aziz Abro
2 min readAug 19, 2021

Pakistanis are obsessed with the perfect victim trope from Pakistani dramas. Unless the girl is poor, wears proper Pakistani clothes, is always crying, never speaks in a loud voice, or never looks up at others while speaking to them, she is not worthy of being a perfect victim deserving of justice for the Pakistani people.

Noor Mukkadam was was tortured, raped and beheaded, but she stopped being the perfect victim when people found out she had male friends and sometimes went to meet them. What's so wrong with having male friends and meeting up with them? The cases of girls/women being physically assaulted/murdered is many times more with men in their own families compared to men who're not. But no, everyone wants to attack Noor and her lifestyle now, ranging from writers to journalists, because her lifestyle wasn't "islamic" enough for them and they got a chance to be their own sick Islamic selves.

It wasn't very different with Asma either. She was brutally tortured by her husband, made to be naked infront their servants, and had her head forcefully shaved, but even all of that wasn't enough for Pakistani people because she sometimes did drugs and partied. How is torture and such humiliation even comparable to this?

And then with Ayesha. She was all innocent and worthy of people's sympathies until they found out that she was a tiktoker and had arranged a fans meetup at that place. She invited them at a PUBLIC place, to make some TikToks and take selfies with them? What's so wrong about that? Why would anyone expect THIS to happen in a public place meetup? But no, people are worried not about her being harassed by hundreds of men, but by the favt that she posted on her social media after the incident, that she didn't cry enough for them to sympathize with her (again that Pakistani drama mentality). But all of this isn't enough for the likes of Waqar Zaka to just be a normal human and atleast shutup about it. He's now going to use all the fame he got hating on tiktokers to spread even more hate against the poor girl and make her life even worse.

Let me make this very clear: even if she had had arrived at the scene fully naked, and had previously informed her followers that she was going to do just that, the onus of responsibility of her harassment would still have been on those men and not on her. But victim blaming is so far entrenched into the Pakistani psych, that thinking along this line is just impossible for them all.

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Aziz Abro

Technical Content Writer by profession, blogger by hobby | CSS Aspirant | Tech Enthusiast | NUST Grad