Dawn Images

After an especially horrific week for Pakistan’s women, actor Urwa Hocane asks why, despite going through so much horror, women were expected to let go of what had happened to them.

In a video posted on Instagram, an exhausted Hocane said that while ‘they’ say “not all women”, it is always a woman who is subjected to such cruelty and expected to walk out of it unscathed.

“It’s always a woman surviving what was meant to destroy her. It’s always a woman asked to forgive before she has even healed. It’s always a woman rebuilding herself [after suffering] from someone else’s cruelty,” the actor said.

She asked why this was something we glorified. “Why is survival a woman’s greatest achievement?”

Hocane joins a number of her industry colleagues in condemning violence against women, especially after a brutal acid attack on Dr Mahnoor Nasir in Quetta. She suffered burns on 70 per cent of her body when a man threw acid on her. The man was later killed by police while attempting to flee the city.

Saturday’s acid attack wasn’t the only case of patriarchal violence in the news last week, with people similarly horrified when a 64-year-old man admitted to killing his wife after she refused to go to bed with him. What was even more horrifying was a video of lawyers surrounding the man and telling him he wasn’t to blame.

With people defending women’s murderers and trying their absolute hardest to blame the victims for being attacked, Hocane’s questions sting hard. Why is it always women who have to carry the burdens of crimes committed against them and when will we make criminals and abusers pay instead?