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Romaisa Khan, the actor most recently seen in Dar-e-Nijaat, has something to say about the state of the country right now. She wishes she could tell everyone to leave.

“I wish I could, I wish it was that easy. I wish that was a solution but it’s not. You’ll go abroad and you’ll need a job, to get that you’ll need to be educated, we don’t have education rights here, we have no education here, certainly not for women, whom we hide away, and if they do go out, they murder or rape them. Does that make any sense?” she asked in an impassioned video shared on her Instagram on Thursday afternoon.

“And if someone does study and get out of here, man or woman, will they be able to leave their families behind in a country like this where every day there’s a new hashtag, where every day a boy, girl, young woman, or young man is murdered or raped. Will you leave them like this?” she asked, echoing the sentiments of many, many young people across the country.

As instances of rape, murder and official negligence pile up, people across Pakistan have spoken up about how helpless and disillusioned they feel. Khan isn’t even the first celebrity to talk about the state of affairs in Pakistan — many have posted about the horror and disgust they’re feeling right now at a time when 14 babies were burned to death at Pims hospital in Islamabad, the body of a young girl was found days after she went missing in Peshawar, and a 45-year-old woman was killed in Islamabad.

“We all have anxiety, our minds are done for. For us, it’s an achievement to have made it through the day alive. Going from one place to another has become a battle for us, how can we achieve something for ourselves, come up with out-of-the-box ideas or make this country proud when all our energies are spent on this nonsense?” she asked.

For most mothers, their minds are riddled with worries, both for their children — whether they’re okay right now, whether they got home okay, whether anything happened to them — and for themselves — whether their phone will get stolen, whether they will get raped, kidnapped or murdered. “All our energies are spent on this,” said Khan. “What can you even achieve or what good can you do? Just getting through this alive is an achievement.”

She also highlighted how boys in Pakistan aren’t raised in a way to respectfully engage with women. “You can respect their boundaries and your own, take no for an answer, and create a safe space for women,” she said. “If you see a woman walking on the road, you don’t have to sexualise her or fantasise about her or do something to her. If that isn’t enough for you, you do it to small children in your own families, children who are so young they don’t even know what’s being done to them or you see a little child on the road, a little one so young they don’t even know how to talk yet and you don’t spare them either,” she said.

“It’s because you haven’t been taught how to exist, how to live respectfully with others around you, you aren’t an animal, but you don’t spare animals either,” Khan said. She also highlighted one of the biggest problems in Pakistani society — not being able to discuss these issues rationally and without men taking them personally. “If we say something, if we say that this is happening in our society, you men take it as an attack on your ego, as if someone said something to you directly. You should be the ones saying something! You say men are there to ‘protect’ women, then say something, why does your ego get hurt?” she demanded.

The actor urged people to get to the root cause of the issue.

“If a woman gets married, her husband murders her. If a girl goes to study, they kill her. If a child is going to a madrassa, they rape him. People get kidnapped and then only their bodies are found,” she said. “It may not have happened to you, but let me tell you if it does happen to a child in your family, your trust is shattered. All parents across Pakistan, their trust is shattered.”

She asked which mother can sleep peacefully at night, knowing that when they send their children to school, there are so many chances that something could happen to them.

“Then there’s the incidents — fires, floods. The fire at Gul Plaza. The fire at Pims, children who haven’t seen anything of the world died. In any other country, even if they were dogs who died, people would have lost their minds.”

“There are no precautions, no preventions and no justice. You can’t say anything, you just keep talking and there’s no one to listen to you, no one to ask,” she said.

After all this, she asked why people then blame Pakistanis for being hopeless.