have seen more than my fair share of women who have faced abuse and violence. In a career in psychiatry spanning close to thirty years, there have been thousands. Women abused by their husbands, their boyfriends, their sons, their brothers, random strangers—the list is endless.

One of the most shocking incidents while I was doing my psychiatry training in Houston was the brutal rape and murder of a fellow woman doctor from South America. She had once given me a ride back to my apartment after class. A short, cheerful woman, much older than me, she was blonde. I was twenty-seven at the time. I was new in Houston and did not have a car. She may have offered me a ride or perhaps I had asked for it. We got in her shining new SUV and she dropped me off at my apartment close to our medical centre. I would see her around the hospital from time to time and she would always wave at me cheerfully. I knew she was married with two young children. We lost touch after she moved to another hospital. Many years later, working in another state, I read that she had been raped, stabbed and brutally murdered at her home by a homeless drifter. Her house was a couple of miles from my former apartment. Her husband had been travelling and her children were not at home when it happened. For years afterwards, I would think of her from time to time: her smile—the flash of her white teeth; the blonde hair; and then images of her assault. It was very painful.

Something similar happened to a younger woman I worked with in the US. She was a therapist in our clinic. I did not know her well. She lived alone. A former boyfriend broke into her apartment one night and after an argument, strangled her to death. I was older and we had never formally met. It was still shocking but this shock was less serious than the earlier one had been. Perhaps by then I had also hardened after years of hearing stories of physical abuse from my women patients.

Fast forward fifteen years. By the time Noor Mukadam became a household name, I had been back in Pakistan for a few years. I was now well familiar with the pattern: women in America faced their own set of challenges; women in Pakistan, a whole other set. Even so, the brutality of the Noor Mukadam incident was unprecedented. This time, I had to spend a considerable amount of time consoling and counselling not just my patients but my women co-workers and colleagues as well.

The secondary trauma was overwhelming. It seemed like an assault on womanhood itself.

For every case that makes headlines, there are countless others that do not. My own perspective has changed since I became the father of a daughter.

A few years ago, my wife laughingly related an incident to me. Apparently, on a family trip to the local mall, my older son had mentioned to his younger (much beloved) sister that she needed to wear a dupatta. According to my wife, who gleefully narrated the incident, my son was dressed down and reprimanded immediately and forcefully by his sister. How dare he tell her how to dress? Much to my gratification, my daughter cited my never objecting to her dress choices as proof that he needed to mind his own business.

Having never grown up with a sister, raising a daughter has taught me things I could not otherwise have learned. Having grown up in a family full of educated, emancipated women, it has perhaps been easier than it may have been otherwise.

I remember the South American physician who once drove me home after class, her smile and her easy kindness. I remember the young therapist whose life ended in her own apartment. I remember the grief and fear that followed Noor Mukadam’s murder. I think of my daughter, my students, my colleagues and the countless women patients whose stories I have heard over three decades. The details differ; the lessons do not.

Inevitably, when a woman is assaulted, we speak of statistics, criminal justice and cultural factors, including ideas of honour. We debate causes and solutions. Every victim is someone’s daughter, sister, wife, mother, friend, colleague or teacher. But is a perfect stranger any less deserving of our empathy?

The measure of a society is not how loudly it condemns violence after it has occurred. It is whether women can move in the society and through their lives with dignity, freedom and safety.

The writer is a psychiatrist and a faculty member at King Edward Medical University. His latest book is Secrets: Stories of Psychiatry from America and Pakistan (Sang-e Meel Publishers).