Over the past few weeks disturbing incidents of violence against women have taken over the news and social media cycle. According to Thomson Reuters Foundation Pakistan is ranked as the sixth most dangerous country for women in the world.

Last year the country saw more than one thousand cases of girls and women killed in the name of ‘honour’. Seventy percent of the women in Pakistan have faced domestic violence at least once in their lifetime. Women all across the country are unsafe. The threat to women transcends class and age boundaries. From the daughter of a former diplomat murdered in Islamabad to a mother of four in Hyderabad tortured and murdered by her husband, all women are vulnerable.

Perhaps even more alarming and disappointing than the cases mentioned above is some of the reaction to them. Every time an incident of gender based crime is reported millions of questions are raised about the profile and whereabouts of the victim. “What was she wearing?” “Why wasn’t she more careful?” “Why did her parents let her go out so late?” These questions serve to obscure the responsibility and failure of the state and the agency of the criminal by implying that some of the blame must fall on the victim. The moral seems to be that ugly things happen only to women ‘who are not careful’ or those ‘who don’t dress modestly’ or those ‘who go out late.’ However, the data are not so reassuring. All women in the country are unsafe regardless of what they wear or where they live. A survey carried out by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) showed that a third of all women in the Punjab (aged between 15 and 64 years) have been a victim of violent gender based crimes.

Meanwhile, the broad consensus needed for legislation against domestic violence is lacking and the conviction rate in the cases that make it to a court is around 2.5 percent.