There have been 3000 of them over the past seven years.

According to the numbers collected by the Aurat Foundation, three thousand women were killed for honour, most by their own family members.

Their short lives and grotesque deaths were documented in short, perfunctory paragraphs in the back pages of Pakistan’s newspapers, the daughter of one, the sister of another, all of them dead.

Some were stoned, some were burned and some were buried alive.

Also read: Murder for 'honour': Over 3,000 victims in seven years

All of them died at the hands of their own, for the crime of exercising their will against the desires of the men, husbands, fathers, brothers who owned them. Every now and then came a particularly horrendous case, with circumstances more dire than most, ruthlessness and cruelty beyond the usual horrors and so it occupied the fevered attentions of the still living for a few minutes longer.

The case of Farzana Parveen was one of those. Her stoning outside the Lahore High Court shocking the flailing conscience of a nation used to brutality.

Farzana had gone there to seek help against her own; those who had opposed her marriage, those that wished her dead. She almost made it, almost escaped, becoming one of the three thousand whose spilled blood is for their killers a ritual of restoration. Farzana Parveen had come to plead to the court that she was not a commodity. Her family killed her before she could make it inside.

This past Wednesday, another court sentenced Farzana Parveen’s father and brother to death for her murder; a punishment that will be reduced to life imprisonment owing to the moratorium on executions. Two other men were also sentenced to 10 years in prison and a fine for participating in the stoning.