Daily Times

On Thursday, a first-ever global and regional estimate on sexual violence against children released by the UN lamented how every 1 in 8 females was cursed to have experienced rape or sexual assault before the age of 18.

In light of heartwrenching stories that continue to hit headlines in our part of the world, we would dare disagree: the situation appears to be the other way around.

Three years is too short a life to have experienced such unimaginable suffering, but fortunately, for the poor girl’s soul, she did not survive the onslaught. Perhaps, the thrill of sodomising her was not enough and therefore, the suspect, someone who had known the victim for the entirety of her life first strangled her only to later stash her in a gunny bag before throwing her in a garbage dump in Karachi.

The horrifying parallel to Kasur’s seven-year-old Zainab, whose mutilated dead body forced the Pakistani nation to step out of its comfort zone and address the elephant in the room, cannot be ignored. However, just as before, a fleeting wave of outrage wherein the whole of the country would raise calls for hangings or killings would do little to provide any meaningful protection to millions of innocent children from sexual abuse.

May it be our staunch opposition to sex education in schools, which by extension means that most of the children are never taught how to protect themselves. The apathy from their caregivers is just as distressing as a large number of teachers (and even parents) do not know how to detect signs of child abuse.

Of course, the need to investigate the troubling frequency of these incidents, out of which only a small fraction get reported, cannot be stressed enough. What is it in our society and its pervasive culture of shame that we continue to breed generations after generations of pedophiles? But then again, the all-too-common miscarriage of justice, largely due to a weak justice system, assures them that no matter how deplorable their crime, a small bribe would easily earn them a free pass. *