Do men and women experience time differently? For weeks now, Islamabad has been held hostage by men behaving badly and deadlines and schedules have done no damage to their sense of self. Meanwhile, a different story is playing on loop for a 16-year-old girl in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: every day she wakes up and remembers that men stripped and paraded her naked through her village and there is no justice in sight. Each day is a bullet for her; each day for those badly behaved men is a blank.

The girl’s public humiliation in October was a punishment for her brother’s (alleged) transgression. The police initially refused to file a first information report and when it did, it filed one against her family and not those who had attacked her and filmed it. As I write this, the Supreme Court has taken notice of the lack of progress on the case and asked for weekly reports. I wonder how different those reports will be from reports of similar incidents, stretching back decades. That is how long this particular brand of vengeance has been recognised as a crime punishable by life imprisonment or death in our penal code.

Revisiting stories about women and girls humiliated as revenge on their brothers and fathers and sons and, in one 2012 case, son-in-law, a reader will find three recurring motifs: women are chattel, to be naked is to be powerless and policemen are villains more often than they are heroes.

The first is not surprising. We are used to daily demonstrations of the most profound, egregious misogyny. And that is only from the men in our lives, about whom we will not speak because the darkest secret of patriarchy is that its foundations are love. If an alien fell from the sky and asked, “But there are so many of you, why don’t you just rise up?” millions of women would leap to explain how just because their fathers, brothers, husbands, friends and sons colluded daily in the maintenance of an oppressive social structure didn’t mean they liked doing it.

The second is many things. A visual metaphor for helplessness. A reminder of vulnerability, and that a woman’s body is always just a body but never just her body. Some years ago, a mother in Haripur was stripped in front of her entire village, and her little son. In the video interview of her I saw on BBC, she said she hasn’t gone back to the village since. She couldn’t face the shame, she said. I wanted to ask her what it was she was ashamed of. That strangers had seen her naked? Or that the son she was raising finally understood she couldn’t protect him either?

Usually the villain and never the hero seems, I know, unfair to many principled police officers. Have you seen the video of policemen beating up a woman in Sialkot on court premises in September while their colleagues watched? It helped me understand what the station house officer of my neighbourhood thana meant when he said to his subordinate during my last visit: “Yeh good family say hain. In ko thanay nahin aana chahiyay” (she is from a good family, she should not visit a police station). We know that policemen have laid down their lives for us, protected us from militants and terrorists and anti-nationals and burglars and muggers and bad lifestyle choices. Why then is it that when it comes to protecting us specifically from each other they can’t do their jobs?

We are often told, when we complain about the conditions of our metaphysical servitude, that it takes time to change things. Regional traditions, tribal customs, cultural norms — it will take time to erode all this. The wise woman will realise, and teach those who come after her, that t his patience, too, is a clause in our indenture. The truth is – and this is possibly the reason that the teenage girl will never get justice and the reason that the mother never went home again – most men don’t want things to change.

This article was published in the Herald's December 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is the author of three novels, including 'Tunnel Vision', which was nominated for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for best first book.