The lingering feeling of being watched, the discomfort of knowing that somebody could be leering at you from a crack in the window or in a trial room is not unfamiliar to us.
And that’s why when this Pakistani girl discussed being filmed in her own room by three men, while she was changing clothes, social media responded with empathy and disgust.
Her post went viral for all the right reasons, with people expressing their anger at how conveniently our society allows men to barge into women’s spaces without any regard for privacy.
This post came after her initial Facebook post on a page called ‘Girls at Dhabas’, where she recounted her experience of being blackmailed with a “nude video”.
At around 12 am, she heard a knock on her window, opening which, she saw three men asking her to take a chit from them.
The chit demanded that she come out of her house and before she could rubbish the information in it, she noticed that it stated the colour of her underwear.
At that moment, she realised she had to take the matter into her own hands and went out to give them a piece of her mind.
However, they ran away before I was able to catch them but I made sure that my whole colony woke up and heard what happened. The questions that followed were basically polite jabs at my character: why was her window open? Are you sure she’s not involved with one of the boys?
“This is not the FIRST time I have been sextorted, nor am I the only woman going through it. So when you all whine about the extremists in our government, the rapists roaming free, the level of sexual and physical abuse women face in their homes, know that it doesn’t come from a VACCUUM,” she writes.
As she rightfully says, every time one stays silent about an incident like this, they go on to validate it, instead of addressing it.
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