An open letter to Desi parents in the East, the West, or anywhere you call home

With 10 tips for parents to prevent gender-based violence.

Many Desi parents believe girls are safer in the West. They’re not.

I’m raising a 12-year-old desi girl in the US and I’m terrified. And I raised her for 5 years in Pakistan.

Yes, girls deal with less societal scrutiny and slut-shaming in the West. There is less harassment on public transportation and the streets. They face less family or community judgment, victim-blaming,and policing. And yes, they have more equal opportunities to bloom here, in sports, education, independence, and leadership.

But safety from male violence they do not have here.

Gender-based violence — especially femicide — is rising across the world, and girls aren’t safe anywhere unless we raise boys and girls differently, intentionally, and justly.

In the US, nearly three women are killed every day by an intimate partner, many after attempting to leave or rejecting the man. Femicide has surged 25% in the US in the past decade.

These numbers aren’t close to global numbers, where every 10 minutes, a woman is killed by a partner or family member. But this is hardly data that a parent in the West can sleep easy on, especially since it's getting worse. I’ll get to the reasons for that shortly and I’ll end on tips for parents on how to protect and prepare their children for a world where gender-based violence is surging and being celebrated.

300 more years of gender inequality

The truth is the world today is more equal for women and girls than ever before — but progress is too slow, too fragile, and too uneven. According to the UN, it would still take almost 300 years to achieve gender equality globally.

Gender equality is the idea that people of all genders – women, men, girls and boys, as well as those with non-binary or trans gender identities – have equal rights, responsibilities, and opportunities.

It does not mean that everyone is the same or should be the same (a myth perpetuated by the manosphere and the anti-rights movement) but that the rights and dignity of each person are respected equally.

In practice, this means ensuring that women and girls have the same access as men and boys to education, jobs, leadership roles, and decision-making. It also means recognizing and fairly sharing unpaid care work.

Women's representation in the labor force has remained largely unchanged for decades, and their unpaid care work — from raising children to supporting elderly relatives — remains invisible in most national GDPs, despite being the backbone of families and economies. Women and girls contribute the least to climate change and yet suffer the worst consequences. Gender-based violence remains widespread and underreported. And at this pace, a girl born today will be 40 years old before women hold as many seats in parliament as men.

If you’re the parent of a boy, I’m going to warn you that this is going to be an uncomfortable but necessary read. If you’re the parent of a girl, this might be terrifying but helpful; and if you’re a woman, it might be triggering.

Extraordinary women and ordinary men

An extraordinary 17-year-old Pakistani girl who was yet a woman was stalked, targeted, and killed in her home in Islamabad this week by a 22-year-old man from Faisalabad.

Sana Yousaf had close to half a million TikTok followers and her brand was joy, dancing, encouraging agency, empowering girls, and countering stereotypes about Pashtun culture.

Her digital trail shows she was talented and wise, way beyond her years.

In her videos, Sana is entrepreneurial, gentle, confident, brave, caring, community-oriented, and often bursting with pure joy.

Her perpetrator Umar Hayat’s digital trail shows he was ordinary.

Nothing about him was original. Islamabad’s top police officer referred to him as an “unemployed man who repeatedly attempted to contact the victim. Upon her refusal to respond, he committed the murder.” His account went private before his arrest, but there are images of him circulating with AI generated tattoos, bad modelling pictures, and a generic tribute to Sidhu Moose Wala, the 28-year-old Canadian Punjabi political rapper who was gunned down in India in 2022.

Sana was building a future. He was circling in mediocrity.

Yet he didn’t just think he had a chance with her, he thought he had a right to pursue her, whether she was interested or not.

I want you to pause here and think about that. Why did this mediocre man even think that? And now think about all the mediocre men you know pursuing or married to some of the brightest women you’ve met.

Sana’s murder wasn’t about obsession or mental illness. It was about entitlement. Entitlement fed by culture, parenting, media, and influencers— the belief that women’s bodies, time, and futures exist for men.

I say this as someone who was stalked and harassed by 9 different men over 10 years from my teens to my mid 20s, while I lived in Islamabad, was in college in Ann Arbor, worked in DC, and again worked in Islamabad. When I was making this list, I was appalled at the number and the timeline. Some of these men I went to school with, some I worked with, and some were from extended social circles, but they all had the same thing in common, they had zero compatibility with a woman as opinionated or political as me, they didn’t take my no for an answer multiple times, pursued me for months or years, showing up at my workplace, school, jamming up my phone with threatening messages from different numbers, some recruited others to trick me to meet them, and in every single case the harassment stopped after I recruited a male friend or family member to intervene, and threaten them to stop it. Not all of them were desi. I was starting out in my career and didn’t feel safe escalating to HR, and the one case that I did, I was told to ignore it and move on. These were all stalking cases, where I had to take extra precautions and felt unsafe at work or my home or even using my phone.

Boys are often raised to believe the world belongs to them — and by extension, the girls in that world. They’re taught they have the right to control women’s bodies and choices. This begins at home: in how parents police them differently than their sisters, in how fathers and their extended families treat mothers as unpaid labor, and in the daily reinforcements from films, dramas, pop culture, and media. But the most insidious lessons are learned at home.

Boys grow up believing they deserve the best in life simply for existing — even when they’re unremarkable.

Girls, on the other hand, are taught they must be extraordinary to earn even the basics: an education, a profession, a decent marriage, or a relationship built on mutual respect.

From what I can gather, Sana Yousaf’s parents were different.