The Boys Who Stare
The Boys Who Stare
Every day, in the school corridors, bazaars, and college gates of Pakistan's cities, girls walk past groups of boys who look at them in a way that is hard to describe but impossible to miss. It is not a glance. It is a stare that lingers, followed by whispers, laughter, and comments. Sometimes the comments cross every line of decency, reducing a girl to her body, her clothes, or her "type." Most people walk past this scene without a second thought, because it has become so ordinary. I decided to stop walking past it, and instead to watch, listen, and understand why it happens.
An experiment in observation
I made friends with two different groups of boys, chosen deliberately because they seemed to have different attitudes and backgrounds. My only goal was to spend time with them, observe their conversations, and understand their mindset when it came to girls. I did not tell them I was watching for anything in particular. I simply listened.
What I found surprised me, not because it was rare, but because it was so common in both groups. Despite their different personalities and different circles, both groups shared the same habit: commenting on girls' bodies and staring at them as they passed. It did not matter whether the boys were quiet and reserved or loud and outgoing. The behaviour was the same.
The two groups were quite distinct in how they presented themselves. One group liked to appear "sharif," decent, almost diplomatic in manner, the kind of boys aunties in the neighbourhood would call well-mannered. None of them had studied in co-education schools. The other group was more open about everything, including their opinions of girls, and all of them had studied alongside girls in co-education schools.
My first instinct was to blame the absence of co-education. Boys who grow up in single-gender schools, I thought, simply never learn to see girls as classmates, friends, or equals. Girls become mysterious, distant, and therefore objects of curiosity and comment.
A harder truth
But then I looked closer at the co-education group, expecting them to behave differently. They did not. In fact, some of them went further. Their comments were not just about appearance; they moved into territory that can only be called sexual harassment. This was the most concerning part of my observation. Familiarity with girls as classmates had not necessarily built respect. In some cases, it had simply given boys more confidence to cross lines they should never cross.
"Girls are made beautiful so that we can look at them. We are just appreciating them. What is wrong with that?"
When I asked either group directly why they stared and commented, the answer came back almost rehearsed, in nearly the same words from boy after boy: "Girls are made beautiful so that we can look at them. We are just appreciating them. What is wrong with that?" It was said with complete sincerity, as if it settled the matter. No one in either group seemed to see a difference between admiring something beautiful and making a girl feel hunted on her own street. That single line, repeated so often across two supposedly different types of boys, told me more than anything else in this whole experiment.
I also noticed a pattern around phone numbers. By my rough estimate, close to 80 percent of the boys I spent time with had some girl's number saved in their phone. They would talk to her, sometimes for weeks, but the motive was rarely genuine interest. It was time pass. It was the thrill of the chase. Several boys openly admitted that talking to a girl and then abruptly cutting her off, or juggling more than one girl at a time, gave them something to boast about. In front of friends, this often turned into a kind of performance: "Check out my girl," said with a grin, as if the girl were a trophy rather than a person.
What the girls said
To complete the picture, I spoke to a number of girls about what they experience from their side. Their answers were calm, but heavy with resignation. They said that girls, among themselves, talk about which boys or groups of boys behave this way. They know who stares, who comments, who cannot be trusted. They are cautious by instinct, reading a look or a tone of voice the way one reads a warning sign.
But when I asked what they could actually do about it, the answer was painfully small: adjusting their scarf tight, walking a little faster. That is the extent of the power they have been left with. They cannot confront a group of boys on a street. They cannot always tell a teacher or a parent, because the response is too often "ignore it" or, worse, blame directed at the girl herself for what she was wearing or where she was walking.
A poem born on a daily commute
Long before I ran this small experiment, I had already seen this pattern up close, and written about it. In 2024, while preparing for my XII board exams, I used to travel nearly 20 kilometres from my hometown every day for coaching. On our breaks, my friends and I would go out for a quick plate of pani puri or some snacks. Almost every time, my friends insisted on taking the busier, more crowded route rather than the quieter one, and it did not take long to notice why: it was the route where more girls happened to be walking. That was when I first wrote a Sindhi poem called "Taaro Aa Naalo Manhunjo" (My Name Is Stalker), from the point of view of a man who openly identifies himself as a habitual starer, almost daring the reader with his confession.
Now it is 2026, two years later, and while carrying out this small study I noticed the exact same behaviour repeating itself, in different boys, in a different setting, almost word for word. The poem was not a one-time reaction to a single bad day. It was, and still is, a description of something ongoing. The poem is not a celebration of this behaviour; it is a mirror held up to it, a protest dressed as confession. It captures, in a few plain lines, exactly what my experiment took weeks to document: that this gaze follows a woman regardless of what she wears, where she goes, or how she dresses to protect herself. It is disturbing to read precisely because so many women will recognise it as true, and disturbing to have written, because two years later, nothing about it feels out of date.
Why this matters
This is not a story about a few "bad boys." It is a pattern that repeats itself across different schools, different family backgrounds, and different levels of exposure to girls. Co-education alone does not fix it, and its absence alone does not explain it. What connects both groups I studied is a shared idea, absorbed somewhere along the way, that a girl in public space is available for comment, for judgment, and for entertainment.
Changing this will not happen through one law or one school policy, and it certainly will not change on its own in a country where this behaviour has been normalised for generations, passed from older cousins to younger ones, from one friend group to the next, almost as a rite of passage. It requires parents who correct this behaviour the first time they see it, teachers who do not laugh along with a "harmless" comment, and boys themselves who are willing to call out a friend instead of egging him on for a laugh. It also requires us, as a society, to stop treating "girls are made beautiful so we can look at them" as a joke or a compliment, and start naming it for what it is. Until that happens, girls across Pakistan will keep doing the only thing available to them: adjusting their scarf tight and walking a little faster, while the rest of us keep pretending not to notice.
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