I didn’t know Sana Yousaf. But when I saw her name, not in a graduation post, not in a birthday selfie, not in a future she should’ve had but as a hashtag, I felt the air leave my lungs. #JusticeForSanaYousaf. At first I scrolled past. Like we all do, sometimes, when grief feels too big […]

She didn’t tell me. Not with words. She told me with how she winced when she sat down too fast. How she avoided PE classes and showers. How she flinched when a joke turned sexual. She told me with the way she smiled through pain like she’d been taught pain was just another part of […]

I didn’t see her face in a headline. I didn’t read her name in a breaking news alert. I heard about her the way most stories like hers survive. Whispered, almost apologetically. She was sixteen. Her name was Sifa. She went to gather firewood with her sisters and came back with war stitched into her […]

I didn’t know her name at first. Just the face. Young. Blonde. Haunted. By the time the world met Virginia Giuffre, her voice had already been quieted. Not by fear, not by shame, but by something far more calculated. A non-disclosure agreement. Three legal words that meant she couldn’t speak even after surviving sex trafficking […]

I’ve said no before. In a cafe. On the street. In DMs. Sometimes I smiled while saying it. Sometimes I added, “I have a boyfriend” — not because it was true, but because I thought it would make me safer. It usually did. Mary Spears did the same. She said “no.” And it got her […]

I still remember the first time I heard her name: Noor Mukadam. It wasn’t just another headline I scrolled past. It was one of those stories that grips your throat and won’t let go. A young woman — 27 years old. Held captive. Tortured. Beheaded. In a house in Islamabad. By someone she knew. Someone […]

I still remember the day I learned what period poverty really meant. It wasn’t in a lecture or a book. It was in a story I came across — a girl in Kenya who had bled through her uniform because she didn’t have a pad. She never went back to school after that. The shame […]

I was standing in the drugstore aisle the first time I noticed it. Same razor. Same brand. Same blade count. The only difference? Mine was pink — and $3 more expensive. I laughed at first. Then I checked the deodorants. Lotions. Shampoos. All of them: more expensive if they were “for women.” That was the […]

The thought of losing a child is any parent’s worst nightmare. We’ve all seen horrors on the news over the years of malnourished and starving children in the likes of Yemen, or babies being torn apart by bombs in Gaza. However, what about when our ‘children’ make it to adulthood, and have the ‘world at […]

‘I never got to know her name, she travelled for nearly two hours and joined the queue to collect free bread at the Forgotten Women distribution bakery. As she got to the front of the queue, the noise, the crowd and the heat became overwhelming, as I put my hand out, she collapsed, and her friend started to […]