December 1999: A man sent a letter to the Lahore Police confessing to the murder of a hundred children. Following an unsuccessful manhunt (the largest in Pakistan’s history) the man surrendered himself at the offices of Pakistan’s best known newspaper. Between 1985 and 1999, Javed Iqbal Mughal had abducted, sodomized and murdered…
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The vast majority of women are familiar with a certain sinking feeling. That feeling like you’ve been punched in the gut, coupled with horror and fear. We know the shaky feeling you get when someone takes a good, long look at you from top to bottom, undressing you with their eyes….
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My connection with Manchester happened purely by accident. I initially started out my undergraduate degree in London. But after a family crisis sent my family and I into a domestic violence refuge, push came to shove and we were eventually forced to relocate to my mother’s home town of Bradford….
Read MoreHis hand slides up under the hem of my ruffled cotton dress. We are waiting in the car for my aunt to come out of the store, and her husband’s hand goes from my skinny knee to the inside of my thigh. He smiles and tells me I have very…
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Many people have seen the photograph of 18-year-old Arshad Khan, the Afghan Pashtun* worker at an Islamabad tea stand whose photo has gone viral globally. When the image of this tea vendor who had neither a name nor a story attached to him appeared on my social media timeline, I immediately…
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Recently, many strident voices on social media have been critiquing HEART’s work and misrepresenting our positions on sexual health and sexual violence. While we absolutely do not expect everyone to be on board or even comfortable with our approach, we are strongly opposed to the unscrupulous tactics that have recently…
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As a mother to three sons, I know how rambunctious boys can be. I know the games they play often involve battles, forts, and play fighting with sticks, straws, spoons and yes, even toy guns. To see boys whooping and tearing through backyards while re-enacting fight scenes from the latest…
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Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent…
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“People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.” (Daoud, The Sexual Misery of the Arab World) In an era of fear and loathing, cultural difference stealthily, yet all too…
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I spent Thursday night glued to my phone, refreshing Google News every five minutes. News of an active shooter on the Umpqua Community College campus in Oregon had hit Thursday afternoon, and by early evening, the shooter’s identity was still unclear. At the end of the workday, I shifted from…
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