Pakistan, May 28 -- Not love. Not loyalty. Not even the primal bonds of parenthood. In the Pakistan we continue to inhabit-even now, in 2025-the only thing that seems to run thicker than blood is the corrosive cult of "honour." And that honour, too often, is monstrously believed to reside not in character or courage, but in the subjugated bodies of women and girls.

A three-year-old girl, brutally murdered inside her home in Mansehra. Her "crime"? None. Her mother's true transgression: daring to choose her own husband. For this act of defiant , both mother and child were condemned to pay with their lives.

We might, instinctively, dismiss this as a horrifying aberration. But to do so is to avert our gaze from a stark mirror. This is not a...