Killed for "Honour": Inside Pakistan's Unending Crisis
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| Image source BBC News |
Killed for "Honour": Inside Pakistan's Unending Crisis
Mohammad Ramzan was on a night shift at a cement factory outside Karachi when the phone call came. His 20-year-old daughter, Khalida Chandio, had been shot dead in their village in Sindh. She had been declared "kari" — a local term used to accuse a woman of an illicit relationship — after a gathering of male relatives and village elders decided her fate. Her mother watched the killing on a video that later circulated on social media. "Her screams still echo in my ears," she said. "We couldn't save her."
Khalida's death, in April this year, is not an isolated tragedy. It is one entry in a ledger that Pakistan has kept, in one form or another, for decades — a ledger of women killed by their own families in the name of a code that treats female behaviour as collective property.
What the numbers say
Counting honour killings in Pakistan is itself a contested exercise, because so many deaths are never reported as what they are. Cases get filed as suicides, accidents, or simply disappear. Even so, the documented numbers are stark.
Honour killings recorded by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in 2024, up sharply from 226 the year before.
In Sindh province alone, the rights body and the local group Sindh Suhai Sath counted 112 women killed in the name of honour between January and June of this year. Historical figures show the same grim pattern repeating across two decades: 943 women and girls killed in 2011, around 1,100 in 2015, and more than 4,000 cases reported between 1998 and 2004 alone. Human rights groups have long estimated that the real annual toll, accounting for underreporting, is close to 1,000 lives a year.
The pattern of who dies and why has stayed consistent. Historical HRCP data shows the majority of victims are women, most killed over accusations of illicit relationships or for marrying a partner of their own choosing rather than one approved by their family. A smaller share of victims are men — usually the partner a woman was accused of being involved with.
A system that still protects the accused
Pakistan has changed its laws more than once. In 2004, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act formally defined and criminalised honour killing as a distinct offence. In 2016, after international outrage over the murder of social media star Qandeel Baloch by her own brother, parliament closed a long-standing loophole that had let killers walk free if a family member "forgave" them — a mechanism that made little sense in cases where the killer and the family were often the same people.
Research published by the Research Society of International Law (RSIL) in late 2025 describes a justice sector response that has been slow and far from ideal, even as it credits real progress: the 2016 law reclassified honour killing as an offence against the state rather than only against a person, closing off the pardon loophole in most circumstances, and Supreme Court rulings since 2015 have gradually shifted the burden of proof to be more victim-centred in cases where women are killed inside their own homes — the hardest category to prosecute, since the crime scene is typically under the total control of the family before police ever arrive.
But laws on paper have consistently outpaced enforcement on the ground. Police and prosecutors still often treat these killings as private family matters rather than as murder. Tribal councils, or jirgas, continue to hand down death sentences for "dishonour" in rural Sindh, Punjab, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa despite a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that declared such councils unconstitutional. Convictions remain rare, and when relatives of the victim are also the complainants in a case, they have historically been able to compound or waive charges — a practice the law has tried, imperfectly, to close off.
Why it persists
Honour killing in Pakistan is locally known as karo-kari, from words meaning "blackened man" and "blackened woman" — terms once reserved for adultery that have since expanded to cover almost any perceived defiance: refusing an arranged marriage, seeking a divorce, or simply being seen in the wrong company. Suspicion alone is often enough to seal a woman's fate; evidence is frequently unnecessary once a jirga or a family has decided.
A deputy inspector general of police who has served as a district chief in several parts of Sindh points to the deeper function these killings often serve. Accusations of "kari," he has said, sometimes have less to do with morality than with disputes over land, inheritance, or tribal scores — a woman's death clearing the way to seize property or extract compensation. He also notes a structural problem: the victim is a woman, the accused is usually a man, and often everyone deciding her fate, from the elders to the investigating officer, is a man raised within the same worldview.
This is why activists and legal scholars alike argue that legislation, however necessary, cannot do this work alone. Public attitudes matter as much as statutes. Surveys from the past decade found that a meaningful share of Pakistanis believed honour killing could sometimes be justified — a sentiment that shapes how police, judges, and communities respond long before any law is applied.
The names behind the numbers
Some cases have broken through into international memory. Qandeel Baloch, a social media personality, was strangled by her own brother in 2016 for posting content he considered damaging to the family's honour; he later told police he felt no regret. Samia Sarwar was murdered in 1999 inside the Lahore office of the human rights lawyers she had turned to for help getting a divorce. Farzana Parveen, pregnant, was stoned to death by her own family outside a Lahore courthouse in 2014 for marrying a man she loved.
"I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family... and I have no regret over it." — Farzana Parveen's father, to police, 2014
Saba Qaiser survived being shot and thrown into a river by her father and uncle in 2014, and went on to become the subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary — only to be pressured by community elders into publicly forgiving her attackers so they could walk free.
Each of these cases briefly seized national attention. Each also illustrates how quickly that attention fades once the news cycle moves on, and how rarely outrage translates into consistent prosecution.
A wider reckoning
Pakistan's honour killing crisis does not sit in isolation. A May 2026 country assessment by the watchdog group Genocide Watch placed Pakistan at multiple stages of its genocide-risk framework, citing entrenched discrimination against women and religious minorities as a driving factor — discrimination the report described as widespread and tolerated by the state. Whatever one makes of that framework, it reflects a widening international recognition that violence against women in Pakistan is not a series of unconnected domestic tragedies, but a structural feature of how power, land, and family reputation are managed in much of the country.
What would need to change
Legal scholars who study the justice sector's response point to the same unfinished business: more consistent registration of cases with the state — rather than relatives — as complainant, so that families cannot quietly withdraw charges; better forensic capacity for killings that happen inside homes, where evidence is most easily destroyed; and continued judicial willingness to treat the killing of a woman inside her own family as no less serious than any other murder.
None of this is news to the women still living with the threat. In rural Sindh, one schoolteacher who fled her village years ago after a jirga ruled that she and her husband deserved to die still moves between rented homes with her children, telling neighbours a false name.
"I don't know if I'll still be alive tomorrow. Every knock on the door makes me think they have finally found us." — a schoolteacher in hiding, Sindh
Legal reform arrived for her in principle a decade ago. In practice, it has never reached her door.
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