They say fame comes with a price, but for women, that price is often their safety. The story of Samiya Hijab, a young Instagram creator abducted and harassed by a man who refused to accept her refusal, is not just about one woman’s ordeal. It is about a society that treats women’s visibility as provocation, their independence as defiance, and their refusal as a crime.
The abduction and harassment of Samiya Hijab is not an isolated incident. It is another brutal reminder of how unsafe women are, especially those who dare to be visible, autonomous, and unapologetically themselves.
Samiya, who built an Instagram following through her light-hearted content and became the financial backbone of her family, saw her life turned upside down when harassment moved from the online world to her doorstep. The perpetrator was not a stranger. He was someone she knew. And yet, despite her evidence, despite her complaint, the scrutiny fell not on him but on her.
This is how misogyny functions. It rewrites the story so that women’s choices, visibility and autonomy become the crime, while men’s violence is either excused, minimised or even romanticised as ‘love’.
For decades, women have been warned against being ‘too visible’. Do not laugh too loudly. Do not speak too much. Do not post too freely. Do not claim too much space, or you will face the consequences. But why is the burden of safety always placed on women? Why is invisibility prescribed as protection?
The problem is not that women exist online, in public, or with agency but the mindset that punishes them for it.
The parallels with the Sana Yousaf case, and countless others before her, are chilling. Each time a woman is abducted, assaulted or killed, the immediate instinct of society is to ask: What did she do wrong? Did she provoke? Did she choose the wrong man? Did she miscalculate?
In Samiya’s case, the questions swirled around her relationship history and whether she had accepted gifts. As if accepting a gift is an invitation for abduction, saying no to marriage is a provocation worthy of retaliation. This perverse logic exposes a society that would rather dissect a woman’s behavior than hold a man accountable for violence.
We must pause and ask different questions. Why did Hassan Zahid refuse to accept Samiya’s refusal? Why did he persist with pressure, gifts and threats? Why did he escalate from online harassment to physical abduction? Why do so many men believe that persistence is a virtue and that a woman’s boundaries are negotiable?
These are the questions that matter. These are the questions that expose the deep rot of entitlement and control.
When Samiya released a video statement, her words cut through the noise: “Even if a woman is married to a man, it does not give him the right to forcibly detain, assault, or abduct her”. This is the feminist core of the case. A woman’s consent is not a one-time transaction, nor is it transferable, nor is it overridden by relationships or marriage. Consent is continuous. It can be revoked. And it must be respected. Yet society, steeped in patriarchy, treats consent as irrelevant, something that can be erased by men’s declarations of love or sacrifice.
This conflation of love with possession is one of the most dangerous myths we live with. How often do we hear that ‘he did it out of love’? How often is abuse reframed as passion, violence as devotion, control as care? This is not love. It is insecurity weaponized and entitlement dressed up as affection. And every time we excuse violence under the banner of love, we reinforce the cycle of harm.
And then there is the tired, misogynistic refrain that women are ‘gold diggers’. It surfaces every time a man buys a gift or spends money in the course of a relationship, as if financial generosity is a contractual down payment on ownership of a woman’s body and choices. This argument is both extremely insulting and downright dangerous. It reduces women to transactional objects while absolving men of accountability for their violence. If accepting a gift becomes grounds for suspicion or blame, then what we are really saying is that women must pay with silence, compliance, and obedience in return.
What makes this worse is how such narratives are amplified in the online cesspools of incel culture. Here, misogyny is not only normalised but monetised. Every attack on women, calling them liars, manipulators or gold diggers, becomes content, packaged into angry rants, viral clips and monetised streams. Men who fail in their own relationships find community by blaming women collectively, cashing in on outrage and weaponising female visibility for clicks and ad revenue.
Samiya’s case, like so many others, becomes fodder for an industry that profits from hate. And the cost of that economy of misogyny is paid by women who are stalked, threatened and assaulted offline.
In reality, the case at hand is a mirror held up to all of us, showing how boys are raised and what they are taught about masculinity, love and control. From a young age, men are conditioned to believe that women must bend to their will. They are encouraged to mistake dominance for romance. They are told that persistence pays, that no is negotiable and that possession is proof of manhood. When these lessons meet rejection, the result is abuse, harassment or worse.
We need to ask ourselves: what values are we instilling in our sons? Why are we teaching them that power over women is a marker of worth? Why are we silent when entitlement grows into violence? The Samiya case is a call to reimagine parenting, education and public discourse. Love must be redefined as respect, not control. Affection must mean freedom, not domination.
Samiya’s courage in speaking out must also be recognised. In a society where women are silenced with shame, where reputations are destroyed to deflect attention from violence, her refusal to be quiet is an act of defiance. She has said what so many women know but are too afraid to declare: that abuse cannot be justified by relationships, that gifts do not purchase ownership and that women’s autonomy is non-negotiable.
The writer is a media, research and creative services professional.