Child Abuse in Pakistan – A Detailed Insight

There is this ad that has been going around on the radio for a while now. It starts with the sound of children playing and deciding to go fly a kite. Apparently, because of a certain piece of legislation, this is a prohibited activity and guess, what?? Those kids are put under arrest and taken to jail. They were barely past seven years old-so small that they had to tie ropes around their wrists because they were so tiny, they just slipped right out of the handcuffs. They were prosecuted in a court of law the next day.

This ad was issued by some NGO-I really cannot recall which one, I suppose partly because the only thing that stays in your mind after you’ve heard it are the terrified cries of the imprisoned children, and that under the Pakistani judicial system it is permissible. It doesn’t matter if this was a made up scenario because the fact remains that in Pakistan it is legal to arrest a child if he is seven years of age. In other countries it is 10 or 12. Even that’s less but it’s better than our 7!

Does this even have some semblance of normalcy to it? A segment of our society about whom Rasul-ul-Allah (S.A.W) used to say:

I give my Salaam to children and respect them, and Muslims should follow my behavior and always be warm and loving with children.

For these same children, are we ensuring that they are given as much love and devotion as they truly deserve?

O Muslims, O fathers and mothers, O my followers, be kind and compassionate towards children, for someone who is not kind to children has no place amongst the Muslims.[Source]

As far as I’m concerned, Rasul-ul-Allah (S.A.W) explicitly charted out the disposition towards children as ordained by Islam. Even then, this was in the newspapers in May:

The incidence of corporal punishment in schools is 86% in Pakistan. Corporal punishment includes hitting, slapping and verbal abuse. It should also be noted that corporal punishment is accounted to be one of the major reasons for the high dropout rate in schools in Pakistan.

The thing is, most of us read about such incidents each day but never take them seriously. At least, not seriously enough! A person can read reports and statistics of all kinds, ranging from how 80% of all child violence cases go unreported to  19,000 boy jockeys aged 2 - 11 years have been trafficked to the Middle East from Pakistan, but if we do not accept child abuse for what it is, these numbers will remain exactly that.
Child Abuse Day happens to fall on 20^th November. A number of awareness campaigns have been running this past month concerning this pertinent issue. One definition that I chanced across on the webpage of a radio channel is:

…on an adult’s part, any action or failure to take action that results in physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect and medical neglect of a child or presents a risk to seriously harm a child.

It’s true, in a child’s case, telling him not to stop doing something wrong is just as abusive as actually telling him to do it.

There are so many levels and grounds that a child can be abused over. It could be at home at the hands of the family; in school by teachers and classmates; complete strangers, regional and national laws. For example in 2005, under the FCR, there were about 70 children-the youngest being 6 months old-who “…are behind bars for crimes that allegedly have been committed by their fathers or other extended family members.” They are languishing in Central Prison Haripur with conditional release after 3 years. Abuse inflicted by kin, government, judiciary. What hope is there for them? FCR has been brought under fire for its stringency but enacting laws doesn’t mean they are actually being practiced.

Moving to home-ground, physical and emotional abuse is one of the most common and harmful forms of child maltreatment and can have a lifelong impact-affecting children’s ability to feel safe and loved, the way they relate to others, and their self-esteem. Berating your child because he didn’t do as well as expected in sports/studies and doing it in front of others-a small rant can have disastrous effects. As a parent or responsible adult, your intentions are good of course, but that tirade will stick in his mind. Whenever he sits down with his books or steps onto the field he will have more reason to perform better, but it won’t be because he is motivated to do so, rather bullied and pressured into.

All’s well that ends well, right? Not true! Not in this case. This is what parents, teachers, coaches sometimes tend to practice. Shout yourself hoarse or beat them raw, as long as they do exactly what and how you want them to do.  Hazrat Ali (AS) said:

Do not force your children to behave like you, for surely they have been created for a time which is different to your time. [Source]

In all future arguments, the remembrance of past slights will exacerbate his anger and over time, your child will cease to love or respect you. Believe me it will happen. It’s almost like we unwittingly set out to create mini-Frankenstein’s of our own. We act horribly, thinking we are doing what’s best, and it will all come back to bite us one day.

Conversely, the abuse of a child by spoiling him rotten and granting his every wish. If you deliberately stop a child from developing into a kind, generous person and sully his mind with harebrained dogmas about color and status, you are hurtling him down a path of self-deprecation.

Where a child is concerned, there is no dearth of opportunities to manipulate them. I read an article in “You” magazine a long while back by a woman who wrote about a young boy. She said she was standing on her balcony and there was a traffic jam so cars were stopped right in front of her house. From where she stood, her eye fell on one car where a little schoolboy was seated next to the driver who was molesting him! He drove him to and fro every single day. Did this happen each time? The woman could barely have started screaming off the balcony-there was absolutely nothing that could have been done and the poor child was subjected to a horror that he would never recover from ever. There are some kinds of humiliation that no one can make you forget. You become suicidal just to stop the thoughts pervading your mind. Adults cannot cope with it. What monster forces a child to cope with it?

What about child beggars? Forced to beg for money, food, medicine and being repulsed by all and sundry. Pests they are, but elbow-twisted into it. They hail from rural areas or are born in city slums-often with unknown fathers. They have polio, malaria, measles; all curable and preventable diseases. They are neglected or shepherded to hakims and babas who recommend nonsensical mantras and sugar tablets. Doesn’t this count as abuse? What about dumping a baby in one of those Eidhi cradles? The Punjab Government recently announced that all parents will be arrested if they have a child less than 12 who they don’t send to school. Aren’t these parents abusers too? What of their employers? If a 10 year old washes your car or babysits a younger sibling-aren’t we all abusers too? Child labor is simply a subset of child abuse. Child labor is very common, with the estimated number of working children (5 - 14 years) being 3.3 million.

Children, like women, continue to be vulnerable because they are considered personal property in our feudal-minded society, says Zia Awan, chief of Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid (LHRLA). He says a major reason for the increase in the incidents of child abuse is the fact that the issue does not figure on the agenda of the law enforcers. There are laws to deal with this problem, but they are not enforced. This encourages the perpetrators of these crimes. [Source]

Another aspect of child abuse is child marriages. 7 year old girls married off to crazy old men with bags of gold in exchange or 5 year old housewives whose duties include cooking, washing, sweeping, babysitting and at the end of the day, hiking 13 km and carrying back 5 liters of water. I swear, this is a true story of a little girl named Zahra who lives in Karachi. I read her pitiable story and cursed myself for all the times I have complained about my chores. The little girl was regularly beaten too. Sexual, physical, emotional and domestic abuse-all rolled into one.

Organizations like ACT, Aahung and Aangan are working out there, but in the meanwhile, these flowers of Paradise continue to wilt.

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