We Need to Talk About What We Refuse to Talk About
This article is an attempt to look directly at what we are avoiding. It is not comfortable reading. It is written with the conviction that naming a crisis is the first act of addressing it and that our silence on these matters has cost us dearly in destroyed childhoods, shattered families, spreading disease, and a generation negotiating their sexuality entirely without guidance in the dark, learning from pornography and from the men who abused them.
The Digital Brothel: Snapchat, VPNs, and the Hookup Economy
The disappearing messages on Snapchat were designed for casual conversation. But they turned into a clandestine underworld. Because of the short-lived nature of the chats, it became the ideal venue for hookups, nude exchanges, and sexual solicitation, from early teens to middle-aged to old uncles. Strangers slide into DMs, asking for age, area, and role. This trinity of anonymous sexual solicitation has become normalized. Beyond Snapchat, Grindr, Blued, Tinder, and lesser-known gay dating apps now operate quietly behind VPNs on the smartphones of millions of Pakistani men who would publicly identify as straight, married Muslims.
The VPN industry in Pakistan has flourished not primarily because of political censorship but because it unlocks pornography. Despite extensive censorship efforts, demand for online pornography persists, and users can readily bypass restrictions using widely available VPN services — the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority itself has recorded roughly 20 million daily attempts to reach blocked pornographic sites despite over 844,000 websites already being banned. A Gallup Pakistan survey similarly found men and those under 30 are the heaviest VPN users in the country. We’ve created a highly developed and sophisticated moral edifice of prohibition and failed to substantively address the conditions that engender the behavior in the first place. A 2022 study on problematic pornography use among Pakistani men and women found that depression, anxiety and low self-esteem drive craving-based pathways into compulsive use — evidence that this is a mental-health and public-health issue, not merely a moral failing.
The ‘Flat Culture’ and the New Brotherhood of Anonymous Sex
A new slur, ‘flat culture’, has now come into use among the young urbanites of Pakistan to describe a particular setup, where a small group of males conducts a clandestine affair designed for sexual encounters. In cities such as Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, and more mid-sized cities, these flats serve as informal brothels, meeting points, and safe havens for sexual activity, which has no socially sanctioned space to exist. When desire has nowhere legitimate to go, it goes underground. And underground is where it becomes distorted, exploitative, and dangerous.
Pornography as Sex Education: What We Are Teaching Our Children
The average age of first exposure to pornography among Pakistani youth is now estimated to be between 10 and 13 years. This is not markedly different from global trends, but for the vast majority of our children, pornography is not supplementary sex education. It is replacing it completely.
Our schools do not teach sex education in any meaningful sense. Pakistani parents, overwhelmingly, do not discuss sexuality with their children — not anatomy, consent, relationships, or what healthy intimacy looks like. A qualitative study of parents and teachers in Pakistan found that most adults hold only rudimentary, ritualistic notions of what ‘sex education’ even means, and that parents actively oppose teaching it in schools. Research through the Shaoor project on parent-led sex education found that 98% of surveyed students were entirely uninformed about sex education before puberty, and that not one of them had first learned about it from a parent — leaving peers and the internet to fill the vacuum. A Frontiers/PMC study on community resistance to sexuality education documents how religious and cultural taboo actively blocks curriculum reform even when public-health need is acknowledged. The mosque and madrasa certainly don’t fill this gap. So, the child who encounters pornography at 11 or 12 years old has no frame of reference, no understanding that what they are watching is a product, not a depiction of reality. And no awareness of consent, performance, or the economics of the industry they are accidentally enrolled in as a consumer.
Consistently, studies show that pornography is the main source of sex education for our generation. A study in 2024 on pornography use among Pakistani youth found that 72% were consuming pornographic content on a daily or weekly basis and that this heavy use correlated strongly with risky sexual behaviors, distorted attitudes about gender, intimacy, and psychological harm. A related Discover Education (Springer) study on sexual-themed content and schooling in Pakistan points to the same sociocultural stack — religious taboo, parental discomfort, and absent teacher training — as the structural cause. Pornography does not just depict sex; it teaches gender. And what it teaches is dominance, degradation, and the irrelevance of the other person’s humanity.
How Pornography Rewrites Masculinity
Mainstream pornography teaches boys that women exist to be used. It teaches that sex is something done to someone, not with someone. It teaches that power differentials are erotic, that pain is consent, that the body of the other person is a prop.
Pornography’s gender distortions in Pakistan operate in a specific direction that is rarely discussed openly: the overwhelming prevalence of male-male sexual content in the most widely consumed categories, and the way this content is modifying how young men understand their own desires. In a gender-segregated society where male physical intimacy is socially normalized — men hold hands, embrace, share beds without social comment — the line between homosocial and homosexual becomes blurred in ways that do not exist in more integrated societies.
This is not an argument that pornography makes people gay. Sexual orientation is complex, substantially biological, and not simply determined by content consumption. But pornography does shape sexual behaviors, sexual scripts, and sexual identity — especially in adolescents whose sexuality is still forming.
Bacha Bazi
This is not the same subject as the section before it. As Susan Brownmiller argued in her 1975 book Against Our Will, sexual violence is a tool of power and control, not sex or desire. Let us be blunt about something that is an open secret across Pakistan, especially Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, peripheral parts of Punjab, including Southern Punjab, and the coal-mining districts of Balochistan: the sexual abuse of young boys by older men is not a marginal, infrequent phenomenon. It is a structured, semi-institutionalized practice with its own vocabulary, economy, and social codes.
Bacha bazi describes the sexual exploitation of pre-adolescent and adolescent boys by men of higher social and economic standing. A published academic study in the Journal of Sex Research, based on fieldwork in Mingora, Swat, described the practice as functioning as a ‘transactional economy and a culturally embedded expression of power and sexuality’ in northwestern Pakistan. The research documented how poverty, class hierarchy, and constrained social possibilities structure the vulnerability of boys, who are coerced into sexual relationships with older men through a combination of financial inducement, social pressure, and outright force. An overview by the Anti-Discrimination Centre Memorial situates the practice within the Palermo Protocol’s definition of human trafficking, and a Humanium child-rights briefing traces how decades of conflict and impunity institutionalized it across the wider region.
The Friday Times investigated how recruiters conned parents into sending their boys as young as six from KPK to coal mine areas, where they were exploited sexually, published in May 2026.
The disturbing and thought-provoking documentary ‘Pakistan’s Hidden Shame‘ directed by Mohammed Ali Naqvi, uncovers most of this exploitative economy at the bus and truck terminals in Peshawar. It reports that makeshift lodges are set up every night to serve the needs of passing motorists, and runaway and homeless boys are bought by the lodge operators and sold to paying guests. According to the documentary, about 95% of the truck drivers they interviewed said their favorite way to pass the time is sex with boys. It also chronicles the tale of a runaway boy who ends up in the terminal, only to become a drug addict and prostitute. A pattern of sexually victimizing younger boys ensued, repeated abuse by others, and then by himself, as he described, showing the cycle of sexual victimization. A comparable investigation, PBS Frontline’s The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan, documents the same practice just across the border and traces its modern resurgence to the mujahideen era — underscoring that this is a regional, not purely local, crisis.
According to Dawn, Jinnah Park in Peshawar is a hub of underage sexual exploitation, where men brag about “their boys,” and pimps operate openly and use coded signals. According to Sahil, more than 80% of child abuse cases in Pakistan are underreported. In 2025, around 3,630 cases of child abuse were reported — an 8% rise on the previous year, with children aged 11–15 the most vulnerable group and boys making up 47% of victims.
The Vicious Circle: How Abuse Reproduces Itself
There is a pattern documented by researchers across Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the wider region that needs to be understood clearly: sexual abuse in childhood does not end when the abuse ends. It frequently reproduces itself. The abused child grows up carrying a shattered understanding of sexuality, boundaries, power, and intimacy. Without intervention, without therapy, without any framework for processing what happened to them, a significant proportion of survivors re-enact their abuse — sometimes as perpetrators.
This pattern is documented in the wider clinical literature, not only anecdotally. A review in The British Journal of Psychiatry found that roughly a third of sexual offenders in some clinical samples report a childhood history of being a victim themselves, while a longitudinal birth-cohort study testing the ‘sexually abused–sexual abuser’ hypothesis cautions that only a small minority of male survivors go on to abuse — the link is real but not deterministic, and stigma around this ‘myth’ itself silences disclosure. A neighbouring-region study of male child sexual abuse survivors in Bangladesh found extremely high rates of depression and suicide attempts among survivors, reinforcing how much is at stake when no therapeutic support exists.
The child sent to a madrasa or to ‘learn’ under a local scholar is often sent because the family has no other options for his education. These families are not negligent. They are poor and trusting. And their trust is, in too many cases, catastrophically betrayed. The Qari Sahab abuses the child. That child grows up. And then, carrying his wound and his warped model of power, he may abuse the next child.
France 24’s documentary investigators found exactly this pattern inside Pakistan’s madrasas. A former pupil, now himself an abuser, bore witness to the cycle: he had been abused, had normalized it, and had gone on to abuse others. This is not inevitable — most survivors do not become abusers — but the conditions in Pakistan are almost designed to maximize the risk of the cycle continuing. There is no therapy. There is no support structure. There is a massive stigma attached to being a victim. And the model of sexuality that the abused child has internalized is one of power, secrecy, and violation.
The AP’s 2017 investigation found dozens of police reports from across Pakistan documenting rape, molestation, and physical abuse by madrasa clerics. A high-profile 2023 case in Khanewal documented a prayer leader and senior student gang-raping a nine-year-old boy. The head of the seminary and the student were arrested — because the victim’s uncle came forward. Most victims’ families never come forward. Many are pressured or paid to ‘forgive’ — legally permitted under Pakistan’s Qisas and Diyat provisions — sending the abuser back into the institution and back to the children.
HIV and STDs: The Biological Consequence of the Silence
The physical consequences of Pakistan’s silent sexual crisis are now measurable in disease data that should alarm every health official, every policymaker, and every parent in this country. Pakistan is currently home to one of the fastest-growing HIV epidemics in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region. WHO and UNAIDS reported in December 2025 that new HIV infections in Pakistan rose by 200% over the last 15 years — from 16,000 new infections in 2010 to 48,000 in 2024. In the first nine months of 2024 alone, approximately 9,700 new infections were recorded. A CDC systematic review of HIV outbreaks in Pakistan (2000–2019) and a more recent Retrovirology (Springer) analysis of the current epidemiology both confirm the same trajectory: an epidemic moving from concentrated drug-use networks into the wider sexually active population.
Crucially, the nature of transmission is shifting. Where HIV in Pakistan once predominantly affected people who inject drugs, it is now spreading through sexual transmission — particularly among men who have sex with men, sex workers, and transgender individuals, and increasingly into the general population through their sexual partners. MSMs (men who have sex with men) now account for 22% of people living with HIV in Pakistan, making them the second-largest group of those affected. A ScienceDirect critical appraisal of Pakistan’s high-risk populations reaches the same conclusion from a review of roughly 700 studies, warning explicitly of spillover into the general population. A BMJ Open cross-sectional study of MSM and transgender women in Karachi further found alarmingly high rates of HPV co-infection tied to inconsistent condom use, and UNAIDS’s own ‘Be in the Know’ country snapshot confirms new infections rose 84% between 2010 and 2020 alone.
This is the biological signature of a society where a large number of men are having same-sex sexual encounters they will never acknowledge, using no protection, taking no precautions, getting no testing, and then going home to their wives. The HIV epidemic in Pakistan is, in significant part, a consequence of the pressure placed on gay and bisexual men to live entirely closeted lives — to marry, to perform heterosexuality — while their actual sexual behaviors continue in the darkness where there is no education, no healthcare engagement, and no safety.
Islamabad alone recorded 618 new HIV cases between January 2025 and March 2026 — an average of approximately 41 new cases per month, according to official Ministry of National Health Services data.
HIV does not respect moral declarations. It travels across the silence itself, through the denial, through the bodies of men who must pretend to be something they are not.
Nature, Trauma, and the Question of Sexual Identity
One of the most contested and important questions in this entire landscape is: to what extent is the apparent prevalence of homosexual sexual behavior in Pakistan a reflection of innate sexual orientation, and to what extent is it a product of trauma, situational factors, and social structure?
Some Pakistani men experience same-sex attraction from the earliest moments of their sexual awareness. This is sexual orientation — it is not chosen, not learned, not cured, and not caused by pornography or abuse. These men exist. They have always existed. In a society that denies them any legitimate identity or expression, they find hidden ways to express themselves.
Simultaneously, there are Pakistani men whose same-sex sexual behavior is situational — a product of gender segregation, of the absence of access to women, of early sexual experiences with other males during adolescence. Some of these men would, given different social conditions, identify and behave as heterosexual. The hookup culture of anonymous same-sex encounters in gender-segregated environments is not identical to homosexual orientation.
And then there are the men whose sexuality was shaped — deformed, one might say — by early sexual trauma. The boy who was raped by a madrasa cleric at 9 did not choose his sexuality. Neither did the teenager whose first sexual experience was with an older male cousin, nor did the boarding school student whose sexual awakening happened in circumstances of coercion and fear. Their subsequent sexual behavior and identity are not simply ‘homosexuality.’ It is the sexuality of someone who was abused before they had any chance to discover who they actually were.
Pakistan refuses to engage in any of these discussions. It cannot recognize intrinsic homophilic feelings without criminalizing them. Without addressing gender segregation, it is impossible to recognize situational homophilia. Furthermore, it cannot accept trauma-shaped sexuality without addressing the widespread problem of child sexual abuse. As a result, the harm increases and nothing is acknowledged.
From Platonic to Sexual: The Erosion of Innocent Intimacy
There is something genuinely valuable that is being lost in Pakistani youth culture, and it deserves to be mourned: the tradition of deep, non-sexual male friendship. Pakistani men have historically had access to a rich sphere of platonic intimacy — friendships of great emotional richness, physical closeness normalized by culture, bonds that lasted lifetimes. This is a genuine feature of traditional Pakistani social life that has real worth.
What is happening now is that the hyper sexualization driven by pornography and the hookup culture is colonizing this space. Young men no longer know how to have close male friendships without those friendships becoming sexualized — either in reality or in the anxiety about how they might be seen. The intimacy and closeness of traditional Pakistani male friendship is being corrupted by a sexual landscape that has no healthy grammar.
When the only models of male intimacy available to a teenager are pornographic content and anonymous Snapchat solicitations, the possibility of genuine platonic friendship becomes harder to access. This is a loss that doesn’t yet have an adequate name, but it is real and important.
Can Pakistan Reverse This Crisis? A Sober Assessment
Let’s be truthful about the magnitude of the situation. A generation of young people in Pakistan has grown up with pornography as their primary source of guidance, exploitative digital sexuality, a lack of sex education, and sexual assault. HIV is spreading at a high rate. There are at least nine reported incidents of child sexual assault per day, and that is before accounting for the 80% Sahil says goes unreported. Bacha bazi is still widely used and deeply ingrained.
It is not reversible without confronting enormous resistance from powerful interests — religious lobbies that profit from the current madrasa system, political structures that depend on conservative social norms, and families that have built their honor systems on public denial of private realities. Pakistan’s HIV epidemic will not plateau on its own. The cycle of abuse does not self-interrupt. The sexual confusion of a generation navigating desire in the dark does not resolve without light. Something must change, and the question is what and how.
The time has come for religious scholars and liberals to take revolutionary action rather than get caught up in a confrontation. Many conservatives believe that Western ideals have undermined and are destroying our traditional family structures. Another question must be raised: what have religious authoritarian forces had to offer except for an excessive focus on blasphemy laws, sectarian divisions, and mob violence? Rather than making excuses or engaging in blame games, Pakistan must have the courage to look at the facts without any hypocrisy. While engaged in unnecessary ideological warfare, it is essential not to ignore these structural social issues; otherwise, the crisis will only get worse.
Talking about it won’t change it, and silence won’t change it either. Silence comes at a price, and Pakistan has paid it for decades — in shattered childhoods, in the bodies that bear the burden of disease they were never taught to ward off, in men living double lives which damage everyone they touch. Naming the crisis – as this article has attempted – is the first act. What follows must be tangible: sex education that treats children as human beings who deserve real information, not silence dressed up as protection; institutions that investigate, prosecute, and punish offending clerics and abusers rather than turning a blind eye; public health measures on HIV that reach the men who are at risk, rather than pushing them aside as if they don’t exist; and a national conversation honest enough to hold the complexity of trauma, orientation, culture, and poverty — without collapsing it into a single, comfortable villain. Talking about it will be awkward. It should be. It’s comfort that brought us here.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Mohamin Zeeshan is a scholar of International Relations at the National Defense University, Islamabad.
