Daily Times

On January 9, 2018, seven-year-old Zainab Ansari’s body was discovered in a rubbish dump in her hometown, Kasur. Protests erupted shortly after in the city over police inaction at a string of violent sexual attacks against small children, eventually spreading to other parts of Pakistan. Five years later, little has changed for children in Pakistan who remain just as, if not more, vulnerable to abuse.

This Wednesday, police authorities discovered the body of a six-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted and then dumped into a ditch in Karachi’s Surjani town area. The case has not yet made its way to the national news cycle-her brutal murder didn’t warrant the same outrage that Zainab’s did. But it should have.

The conversation surrounding the prevalence of child sexual abuse is still terribly lacking in Pakistan-crucially, it must be noted that in a patriarchal nation such as ours, dominated by dogma, sex education is practically non-existent. Children don’t have the tools to recognize predators or the language to speak out about them in the event that something happens. In fact, only 34 per cent of children under five in Pakistan are registered at birth, meaning that they have no legal proof of their identity let alone the tools to respond to something as sinister as sexual violence. Nearly 10 cases of child abuse are reported daily in Pakistan, with girls disproportionately expected. Few, if any, of these are registered and fewer still make it to court. It wasn’t until 2020 that Pakistan’s parliament issued national legislation to protect children from sexual violence-the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Bill, the first mechanism of its kind. But not much has changed in practical terms.

In Pakistan, state institutions are far too weak to compel understaffed and underfunded police personnel to live up to their responsibilities. Biases continue to pervade the legal system, even where children are concerned-there is a tendency to view violence against women as a family problem rather than a social one. Most crucially, a pervasive culture of shame keeps victims from speaking out lest they be ostracised by their communities-it will take a long time to challenge these norms and the work is just beginning. *