The media checklist for reporting on gender-based violence is entirely predictable. A high-profile tragedy occurs. Public outrage spikes. A court delivers a swift death sentence. The press celebrates a triumph of justice, closes the file, and moves on to the next cycle.
We saw this exact script play out when a Pakistani court sentenced a man to death for the murder of TikTok star Sana Yousaf after she rejected his marriage proposal. The headlines treated the verdict as a definitive victory, a signaling mechanism that the system works.
It is a lie.
The comforting illusion that the gallows solve deep-seated societal violence is a lazy consensus. It satisfies a tribal urge for retribution while leaving the actual mechanisms of systemic violence completely untouched. Executing a perpetrator does not fix a broken culture. It is a cosmetic bandage on a gaping wound. If severe punishments alone stopped femicide, the problem would have vanished decades ago.
The Deterrence Myth: Why the Gallows Fail
Proponents of the death penalty rely on a deeply flawed psychological premise: the idea that a person driven by possessive rage or deep-seated entitlement performs a rational cost-benefit analysis before committing a crime.
They do not.
criminological data consistently eviscerates the argument that capital punishment acts as a superior deterrent to murder. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has repeatedly highlighted that certainty of apprehension, rather than the severity of the ultimate punishment, is what alters criminal behavior. When a state focuses entirely on the brutality of the sentence, it ignores the massive gaps in the policing and investigative pipeline that allow hundreds of other perpetrators to walk free.
Consider the reality of the legal system in Pakistan and across South Asia. The conviction rate for violence against women remains abysmally low, often hovering in the single digits. This is driven by systemic failures:
- Compromised Investigations: Initial police reports (FIRs) are frequently botched due to corruption, lack of training, or overt bias against female victims.
- Witness Intimidation: Without robust state protection frameworks, families of victims are routinely terrorized into accepting out-of-court settlements or changing their testimony.
- The Loophole Economy: Legal provisions like the Qisas and Diyat laws historically allowed perpetrators to seek forgiveness from the victim's family, effectively enabling wealthy offenders to buy their way out of a murder charge. While reforms have attempted to curb this in "honor" killings, structural workarounds remain rampant.
When the state secures a single high-profile conviction and hypes it up as a monumental achievement, it is a shell game. It distracts from the thousands of cases that never make it past a local police desk. A death sentence in one media-saturated case means nothing to a predator who knows the local police chief can be bribed to lose a case file tomorrow.
The Digital Visibility Trap
The public fixation on the Sana Yousaf case exposes a secondary, equally dangerous misconception: the idea that digital visibility equals empowerment or protection for women.
Mainstream analysis suggests that social media platforms allow women to carve out independent spaces, build financial autonomy, and break free from traditional constraints. While true on the surface, this analysis completely misses the backlash engine that these platforms create.
In a deeply patriarchal framework, a woman’s visibility is viewed as an inherent provocation. When a female creator gains autonomy, a massive digital platform, and financial independence, she does not just attract fans; she attracts an intense, obsessive resentment from men who feel entitled to police female behavior.
The transition from online harassment to physical violence is not a sudden leap; it is a direct continuum. The algorithms of modern social media platforms are optimized for engagement, which frequently means magnifying outrage. A woman asserting her boundaries online is fed into an ecosystem that rewards entitlement and anger. By the time a stalker decides to act in the physical world, he has often spent months validated by an online echo chamber that views the woman’s independence as an insult to his honor.
Securing a death sentence for a murderer after the fact does absolutely nothing to dismantle this digital pipeline of radicalization. It treats the final, tragic explosion of violence as an isolated incident rather than the predictable outcome of an unmonitored ecosystem of hate.
The Failure of Retroactive Justice
I have analyzed institutional responses to violence for more than a decade. I have watched governments pass sweeping, harsh legislation in the wake of public protests, only to watch the underlying statistics remain stagnant or worsen. The playbook never changes because politicians prefer the optics of harsh sentencing over the difficult, unsexy work of systemic institutional reform.
Retroactive justice is an easy sell. It costs very little to hang a man who has already committed a horrific crime. It costs an immense amount of political capital, budget, and sustained effort to rebuild a society's foundational institutions from the ground up.
True deterrence requires shifting the focus from the end of the judicial pipeline to the very beginning.
1. Total Overhaul of First-Response Systems
The moment a woman reports stalking, harassment, or a threat, the system must react with absolute seriousness. Currently, women who approach law enforcement with complaints of harassment are routinely dismissed, told to "compromise," or blamed for bringing the attention on themselves. We need specialized, independent domestic violence and stalking units within law enforcement that are entirely insulated from local political influence and staffed by trained professionals.
2. Radical Judicial Speed and Certainty
A court system that takes years to process a single domestic violence case is an active danger to victims. Perpetrators use these protracted timelines to wear down families, drain their resources, and force retractions. The focus must be on establishing dedicated, fast-track courts for gender-based crimes that deliver verdicts within weeks, not decades. The certainty of a swift ten-year prison sentence is vastly more terrifying to a criminal than the theoretical 1% chance of a death penalty twenty years down the line.
3. Economic and Physical Shelters
An independent woman facing threats needs immediate, secure physical relocation and financial support. Most state-run shelters are underfunded, prison-like environments that punish the victim rather than protect her. Without a comprehensive, dignified network of safe houses, telling a woman to "just leave" or "reject" a dangerous individual is a hollow, reckless piece of advice.
The Harsh Reality of the Contrarian Approach
The brutal truth that advocates for capital punishment refuse to admit is that their preferred solution is a form of societal giving up. By focusing all energy on the execution of the killer, the state implicitly signals that it cannot protect women while they are alive. It settles for avenging them once they are dead.
This approach carries a severe downside. When public anger is satiated by a death sentence, the pressure on the government to execute deep structural reforms dissipates. The collective conscience is cleared, the politicians take credit for being tough on crime, and the underlying rot continues to fester until the next headline breaks.
We must stop celebrating these verdicts as victories. A death sentence is not a solution; it is an explicit admission of absolute institutional failure. It means the educational system failed, the police department failed, the protective frameworks failed, and a woman paid for those failures with her life.
Stop asking for bigger gallows. Start demanding a system that prevents the rope from ever being necessary. The fixation on execution is a coward's shortcut to justice, and as long as we accept it, the slaughter of women will continue unabated behind the smoke and mirrors of state-sanctioned retribution.
