Seventeen-year-old Malala Yousafzai won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest in the history to have received the award. This was two years after a Taliban gun man had shot her in the head on a school bus full of kids.
Her victory and recognition has won the admiration and support worldwide. Over the years of her activism, Yousafzai has received support from politicians, public figures and local citizens globally. However, in Yousafzai's hometown in Pakistan, her victory was seen in a different manner. Some of her hometown's population are not pleased with her achievement.
In some areas of Pakistan, people's ideologies were still on the conservative side, leaning towards a male dominated society and believe that Yousafzai's role in her fight was a conspiracy.
According to Shuja Nawaz, who is a director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, "The same people who were opposed to girls' education or prone to conspiracy theories are not changing their minds." She also told ABC News that, "Their accusation was that this was all staged, that the injuries were not real. It was outlandish, but it showed that there was a lobby in Pakistan that wasn't interested in an inclusive system where women had a role."
Yousafzai is known for her advocacy for human rights focusing on education for women in her native hometown in Pakistan. Local Taliban has banned females from being educated in school. She spent her adolescent years blogging about her experiences under the Taliban occupation and rose to prominence through media intervention. On October 9, 2012, she was shot by a Taliban gunman in an attempt to silence her.
The attempt on her life sparked a worldwide outrage from those who support her advocacy.
According to Nadeem Paracha, a columnist for Dawn, a newspaper in Pakistan, "In those first days there was a lot of confusion, and some of the reactions were very, very ugly," She continued to tell ABC News, "The reaction now to [the Nobel Prize] has been far, far better."
