A nine-year-old girl walks into a school in Kot Addu. She doesn’t come back the same. The arrest of the man accused of attempting to rape her may offer a sliver of accountability but can anyone, daring to proclaim all is well, really deny how he wasn’t a stranger in a dark alley. He was her principal. The very person her parents trusted. What makes it unbearable is not just the raw horror of the act itself; it’s the sickening familiarity, the suffocating weight of how routine these betrayals have become.
In 2023, over 4,200 cases of child sexual abuse were reported in Pakistan, according to Sahil. That’s twelve children a day. Most victims are between six and 15 years old. The majority of abusers? Known, respected figures: teachers who hold positions of power, relatives who should offer unconditional love, and neighbours who are part of the fabric of their community. And for every reported case, many more are buried in silence, especially in rural Punjab, where a distorted sense of “honour” continues to eclipse the fundamental right to justice.
What renders schools such perilous spaces for children is the glaring and pervasive absence of consistently enforced safeguarding mechanisms at an institutional level. How many private or rural schools have functioning child protection policies that go beyond lip service? How many teachers are screened before they’re hired? How many children are taught what abuse is: what’s okay and what’s not? In most classrooms, the answer is zero.
The uncomfortable truth is that education in Pakistan is still built on deference, not dialogue. Children are conditioned to defer to authority. Questions are discouraged. When abuse happens, victims are silenced, families are pressured to “settle,” and authorities are more concerned about the school’s reputation than the child’s life.
This is systemic rot. And it needs to be called out.
Start with mandatory abuse prevention training for all school staff. Enforce background checks before hiring. Make it illegal for schools to suppress or delay reporting. But don’t stop there. Children themselves must be empowered with knowledge. Basic body safety education, delivered in an age-appropriate manner and in Urdu, should be integrated into the national curriculum, starting from primary school.
Perhaps, most urgently, parents need to be told the truth: no institution is safe by default. Not the school. Not the madrassa. Not even the home.
The nine-year-old in Kot Addu has had her childhood irrevocably stolen. But if her case doesn’t force us to rewire how we think about safety, then we’ve already failed every child who walks through a classroom door tomorrow. *