Crimes against children

The News Harris Khalique Wednesday, September 18, 2013 From Print Edition Sumbal is not the first or the last child to be raped or gang-raped in Pakistan. Around the same time, we heard about the case of an eight-year-old raped in Faisalabad and a fourteen-year-old raped in Toba Tek Singh. More bad news arrived from Kasur where a six-year-old was raped and dumped on a garbage heap. It seems our towns and villages are now infested with men who are psychopaths. They are inflicting horror on families and communities across the country and making the already-miserable lives of girls in this country more miserable. Just a couple of months ago a charred body of a young girl who was raped and killed was discovered in a ravine in Rawalpindi. It was found that the man who raped and killed her had done the same to two young girls earlier. Boys are no less vulnerable. I vividly remember a story of a twelve-year-old boy who committed self-immolation out of shock and shame after being raped by two policemen in the Shah Faisal Colony area of Karachi some years ago. And it is not just being a girl in Pakistan that is a threat, being a child is also a threat. Physically, children are the weakest segment of any population. They have to be pampered, cared for, and loved. In any civilised society, they are seen as angels. Even after waging wars and committing genocides in the medieval era, the victorious kings or generals of plundering armies spared children – in most instances. The way we treat our youngest and weakest reflects the kind of society we have become. We live in the second decade of the 21st century and either commit such crimes or let these crimes happen against our children. There is only a modicum of remorse and a constrained anger against the gruesome acts of violence against children. When all of India spoke up and demanded bringing rapists to the book after a gang-rape was committed against a college student in Delhi, hundreds of thousands of people including celebrities took to the streets. In Pakistan, a bunch of civil society, women’s rights and labour movement activists came out with placards in different cities and registered their protest. With all its failings, the media played its due role in this instance and highlighted the issue. A more or less lone voice from the clerics was raised by Allama Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi, the chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council. He is also trying to organise faith leaders to come out and condemn such acts. He is the only major religious leader who spoke out against the assassinations of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti besides taking up the Rimsha Masih case in Islamabad. I stand with all those who are making their voices heard but their collective strength is not enough to convince us that bleak apathy does not exist within Pakistani society. Something you find common between most, if not all, of these cases is that the victim children come from the working class. That is another degree of weakness added to being a child. They are poor. Women and children, irrespective of caste and class, live through a hostile environment in Pakistan. But poor women and poor children are surviving in the most pathetic of social and economic conditions. There have been cases of abuse against people with disabilities and those with mental health conditions. While rape is the most heinous of crimes, it is not the only crime committed against children. Children also work in hazardous or inhuman conditions as house servants, informal labour in light industry or small business establishments, brick-kiln workers, apprentices in workshops, waiters in roadside restaurants, janitors, cleaners and hawkers. According to studies on the subject and investigative journalistic reports, the number of young boys working as commercial sex workers in Karachi and Lahore come up to thousands. I knew a boy, Barkatullah, who has now grown up and works as an assistant to a motor mechanic in Karachi. His mother brought him to Karachi – from Okara – after his father’s death. He was the only child and barely two years old. They lived with the mother’s widowed sister-in-law in Korangi. The mother started doing house work in the nearby Defence Housing Authority. She was run over by a truck when Barkatullah was eight. His aunt sent him to work with a neighbour who worked as a mechanic for cars and trucks. They paid him Rs20 daily for cleaning the different engine parts with oil or other cleansers. He was also supposed to use his teeth to unfasten some auto parts. His nails and teeth got disfigured and crooked. He was slapped in the face or hit at the back of his head on an almost hourly basis by the senior mechanics. At ten, Barkatullah was first sodomised by a truck driver who lured him into travelling with him to Hyderabad on his truck. “He made me eat chicken karahi to my heart’s fill and gave me two bottles of Coca-Cola. I never had that experience before. When he took off my clothes after a while in the back of a shop in Hyderabad, I was so overwhelmed that I found it hard to put up any serious physical resistance. He then reminded me of the great lunch I had and said that nothing comes for free.” The man tried to take him along again a few times in future but Barkatullah refused. He also complained to his senior mechanic who laughed it away. He used to sob when relating this incident some years ago but now after growing up he is filled with enormous rage. “The man moved to Quetta before I grew up. Else, I would have killed him,” he now says. Barkat confirms that there are men who were forcibly made to sleep with truck drivers or influential men in their area when they were young. Now they do the same to other children. Also, according to Barkat, it is not just truck drivers but some men who are involved in these acts come from filthy rich families. Children working in hazardous conditions in factories, workshops, farms and brick-kilns rarely make news stories now but child labour in Pakistan remains excessive and rampant. So many of these children are physically and sexually abused, emotionally and psychologically tortured. One of the worst forms of inhuman treatment meted out to children is in middle-class households. You may recall stories of young girls thrashed so badly by their employers, both women and men, that they had to be hospitalised in critical condition. I remember one minor girl actually died of beating by her masters some time last year. There were others burnt with irons or cigarettes for being lazy about their work or suspected of committing small thefts where they worked. Those who can afford it, keep children as young as their own as domestic help. The scene of a seven-year-old child in tattered clothes with a malnourished face carrying the school bag of a four-year-old child wearing a crisp uniform with cheeks glowing is witnessed without eyebrows being raised. Over the last two years, the number of reported rape cases in the country exceeded 3200 with the majority of the victims falling in their teens. So many more remain unreported due to a combination of social taboos, inadequate existing laws, an outdated criminal procedure code and hostility shown against victims in court proceedings. We may have been producing more such people due to our current social and economic circumstances but every state and society has its share of paedophiles and psychopaths. However, every possible legislative, procedural and social measure is taken by them to restrict or eliminate these killers and rapists. Nobody should be able to go scot-free after committing such crimes against humanity. The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad