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All About the Hidden Crisis Women Face in Pakistan | EP 15 | Dear Body
19 Plays26 days ago
In this episode of Dear Body, host Sarosh Ibrahim takes listeners into one of the most urgent and silenced issues in Pakistan: suicide among women. September marks Suicide Prevention Month, but here, conversations about suicide are often hidden behind whispers of shame and honour. Through real stories from Southern Punjab, Rawalpindi, and Chitral, and with insights from studies by Farooq Ahmed, Neha Jain, and Hussain et al., Sarosh explores how patriarchy, forced marriages, domestic violence, and family honour shape women’s lives, and sometimes, their deaths. This is not easy listening, but it is necessary because silence can be deadly.
You can find me on Instagram @saroshibrahim.
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Transcript
Understanding Suicide in Pakistan
00:00:00
Speaker
Before we begin, i want to say this very clearly. Today's episode discusses suicide, including stories of young women in Pakistan who died by suicide and the social structures that contributed to their deaths.
00:00:14
Speaker
If this feels too heavy for you right now, please listen at another time or maybe not at all, because your mental health comes first.
00:00:26
Speaker
Hello everyone, I'm your host Sarosh and you're listening to Dear Body. September is Suicide Prevention Month and for me, that means confronting a reality we don't talk about enough in Pakistan.
00:00:38
Speaker
Suicide is a word we whisper, if we say it at all. It's a word wrapped in silence, shame and stigma. You'll hear phrases like, she drank something or he hanged himself.
00:00:50
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Or more often just, we don't talk about it, it brings dishonor. But silence kills. And that's why today's episode is one I've been sitting with for a long time.
00:01:02
Speaker
I want to talk about women and suicide in Pakistan and why so many women, especially young women, are taking their own lives and what their stories reveal about our society.
00:01:14
Speaker
This is not easy listening. It never is. But it will be honest and hopefully healing. Let me start with something that shocks many when I say it. Until December 2022, attempting suicide in Pakistan was a crime. Under Section 325 of the Penal Code, if you survived an attempt, you could be jailed for up to a year.
00:01:34
Speaker
Imagine that for a moment. Imagine reaching your lowest point, attempting to take your life. somehow surviving, and instead of receiving care, you're threatened with jail time.
00:01:45
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A paper titled Perspectives on the Decriminalization of Suicide in Pakistan explains how damaging this law was. Families avoided hospitals out of fear, survivors kept silent, and cases went underreported.
The Impact of Legal and Social Stigma
00:02:00
Speaker
Instead of recognising people in pain, the state treated them as criminals. Even now, even after repeal, the stigma is so deep that many suicides are reported as accidents, sudden illness or are simply covered up.
00:02:18
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The World Health Organization estimates Pakistan's suicide rate at 7.5 per insist but researchers insist the true numbers are much higher.
00:02:29
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So I ask you, if we don't even allow the truth of these deaths to be recorded, how will we ever prevent them? When we talk about suicide, especially in the Western context, the focus is often on mental illness, depression, anxiety, trauma.
00:02:47
Speaker
And talking about these mental illnesses matters. But in Pakistan, as feminist scholars remind us, we cannot reduce suicide to biology or brain chemistry.
00:02:59
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You'll understand what I'm talking about once you hear the stories. One study by Farouk Ahmed and colleagues in 2024 interviewed families of girls in southern Punjab, many between the ages of 16 and 25, who had either died by suicide or survived self-harm.
The Role of Societal Structures in Women's Suicide
00:03:18
Speaker
The stories are unbearable, but they need to be heard. One young woman married off to a 70-year-old man through the Vatta Satta, meaning exchange marriage, begged her parents to release her. She said,
00:03:32
Speaker
He can't fulfill my desires. Please ask my parents to free me or I will take my life. No one listened. One day she swallowed Kala Pathar, a cheap black hair dye sold in corner stores and she died.
00:03:47
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Another girl, just 18, constantly humiliated by her brother's wife, also bought Kalapatthar. She mixed it into her juice and ended her life.
00:03:58
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And then, 19-year-old in love, wanting to marry her boyfriend, when he betrayed her, she hanged herself. What ties these stories together is not only despair, but disempowerment,
00:04:12
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These young women weren't allowed to choose, not their husbands, not their future, sometimes not even how they could express
Marriage: A Double-Edged Sword
00:04:20
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anger. Suicide became their last form of protest.
00:04:24
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And I have to pause here because when I read these stories, I kept asking myself, Was this really about mental illness? Or was this about patriarchy, violence and the lack of agency? In our society, marriage is often described as protection, a form of stability for women.
00:04:43
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But study after study shows it can be the opposite, a site of violence, humiliation and isolation. One mother in Ahmed's study said of her daughter, Her future was decided without her consent.
00:04:57
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Soon after marriage, disputes erupted. She thought it was better to end her life. Another girl who ran away with her lover was rejected by her parents when she came back.
00:05:09
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They told her, you buried your honour. We wish you were buried under the earth. She killed herself shortly after. And I keep wondering, When family honour outweighs a daughter's life, what message are we sending to young women?
00:05:24
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Another study by Gul Sayed and colleagues in 2024 interviewed mothers in rural Rawalpindi with histories of suicidal thoughts or attempts.
00:05:34
Speaker
Their voices haunt me. Many described their in-laws' homes, susral, as places of abuse, neglect and loneliness. One woman said she felt like a servant.
00:05:47
Speaker
Another confessed, my patience, my sabir has ended. And yet, what kept many alive was their children. Even in their darkest hours, they would say,
00:05:58
Speaker
I can't leave my children. They need me. Can you imagine the torment of that? To want freedom from suffering but to feel bound to endure it because of motherhood, because of faith, because of the fear of the afterlife? Neha Jain, in her work on women and suicide in South Asia, reminds us that this isn't only a Pakistani problem.
Systemic Failures in Suicide Prevention
00:06:21
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Across South Asia, female suicide rates are amongst the highest in the world.
00:06:26
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Globally, suicide prevention policies often focus on men because in the West, men are more likely to die by suicide. But here it is women and when women's suicides are ignored, so are the structures that kill them.
00:06:42
Speaker
Forced marriages, domestic violence, honour culture, lack of support. So I ask you, Why do we keep pretending this is an individual problem when the patterns are so clearly systemic? I want to share one more body of research that shook me deeply. In 2025, Jafir Yad Hussain, Sahil Sajjad and Kausar Hussain published a study on the determinants of suicide amongst married women in Chitral in KP.
00:07:12
Speaker
Chitral is often romanticized as beautiful and serene. While that may be true, Behind the mountains are stories of suffocating silence. Between 2013 and 2019, local reports counted 176 suicides in Chitral alone, most of them young women.
00:07:31
Speaker
The study, which used interviews with families, found one overwhelming factor – domestic violence. But not just at the individual level.
00:07:42
Speaker
They broke it down using social ecological model. Personal, family, community and societal levels all reinforcing each other. Let me bring you into some of these homes.
00:07:54
Speaker
One young wife was infertile. Her husband told her if she didn't conceive within a year, he'd remarry. Her mother-in-law mocked her daily. She cried, I have no choice.
00:08:07
Speaker
I will have to die to escape this hell-like life. Another was beaten because her husband had an affair and when she confronted him, he broke sticks over her body. Another, trapped in a joint family of 10 people, begged for a separate home.
00:08:23
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When her husband refused and the abuse continued, she ended her life. Do you see the pattern? These women weren't weak. They were cornered. Every level of their environment failed them.
00:08:36
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Families silenced them. Communities offered no support. And society normalized their abuse. And perhaps most heartbreaking, one father defended his son and his own violence, saying, Running the home, cooking, child-rearing, these are duties of females.
00:08:56
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If they don't fulfill them, they should be punished. This wasn't just one man's belief, it was the society's view and that view killed his daughter-in-law.
00:09:07
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The Chitral study also found that there were no women's police stations in the district. Families discouraged women from going to male-dominated police stations because of shame, so women had nowhere to turn to for help.
00:09:21
Speaker
The researchers observed women carrying bundles of sticks, working from dawn to dusk, trapped in cycles of exhaustion and despair. One woman, asked about her life, whispered that her only escape was death.
00:09:36
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And I want you to pause with me here. Think about what it means when death feels more accessible than justice. Again, i circle back to this.
00:09:47
Speaker
Is this really just depression? Or is it patriarchy? Is it systemic violence dressed up as personal tragedy? Because here's what's clear. When women's suicides are reduced to mental illness alone, but prevention in Pakistan must also mean outlawing and enforcing bans on forced marriages, regulating lethal substances like Kaala Patthar, creating shelters, building community support and challenging honour-based violence.
00:10:17
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Sometimes I ask myself, what if just one person had listened What if one parent had said, your voice matters? What if one husband had held back an insult and offered his support?
00:10:31
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What if one law had offered protection instead of punishment? How many lives could have been saved? So where do we go from here?
Strategies for Effective Prevention
00:10:40
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1. Public health There needs to be a ban placed on lethal substances like Kalapathir, improving emergency response for poisoning. 2. Legal reform legal reform Outlawing forced marriages can be the second step and actually enforcing those laws. Social support Building shelters, hotlines and safe spaces for women, some of whom do exist today for them to rebuild their lives instead of putting an end to it.
00:11:11
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number four 4. Cultural change Start conversations at your home, in schools, Mosques, workplaces, break the silence. Number five, policy.
00:11:24
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Pushing for a national suicide prevention strategy that reflects our gendered realities. And on a personal level, listen. If someone says they feel hopeless, don't dismiss them.
00:11:36
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Sit with their pain. Sometimes that's the first line of prevention. I want to end with a story shared by a teacher in Ahmed's story. One of her teachers lost her lover to illness.
00:11:47
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Her brothers refused to support her. She told her teacher, I have no reason to live. I want to die. Soon after, she hanged herself. I think of her and of all the others and I wonder, how many lives could be saved if women were simply given more choices, more respect, more support? Suicide prevention is not just about hotlines. In Pakistan, it's about dismantling the structures that make life unbearable for women.
00:12:15
Speaker
If you've been affected by this episode, please reach out to someone you trust. And if you want to continue this conversation, you can find me on Instagram at Sarosh Ibrahim. Remember, your body, your life, your story, all of it matters. That's it for today's episode of Dear Body. Thank you for sitting with me through this difficult but necessary conversation.