A man was arrested this week in Muzaffargarh for allegedly producing and circulating child pornography. What police found was devastating: videos of children being abused, stored across phones and hard drives, and trafficked through dark web networks. It’s a story that should never repeat but in Pakistan, it already has. Many times.
In 2015, the town of Kasur was rocked by one of the largest recorded child abuse scandals in South Asia. Over 280 children were sexually exploited on camera over several years, while local authorities failed to act. Public outrage briefly broke through the denial. But justice, like so often in Pakistan’s legal system, was slow, uneven, and ultimately forgettable.
The Muzaffargarh arrest follows a now-familiar pattern: a low-level suspect caught, a community in shock, and a cycle of silence reasserting itself. The same failures persist. Investigators lack digital forensic training. Cybercrime units are underfunded. Prosecutors rarely see cases through. The law exists, but implementation is erratic. Victims face deep stigma and community pressure to remain quiet. There is no working sex offender registry. No central database. No systematic child protection infrastructure outside a few major cities.
Even more concerning is where the political priorities lie. While Pakistan’s cybercrime laws have been used to target political dissent and journalists, they remain weakly applied in cases of child exploitation. The Punjab government has spoken about reform but child protection remains low on the legislative agenda. Nationally, there is no coordinated plan, no clear leadership, and little public accountability.
The abuse of children in Pakistan is rarely about lone predators. It is about networks (legal, digital, and political) that allow them to exist. It is about a system that moves slowly for the powerful and barely moves at all for the vulnerable. Until Pakistan’s state machinery recognises the pattern, allocates the resources, and commits to confronting the social norms that keep victims quiet and offenders free, these cases will continue. And each time, the outrage will fade faster.
Pakistan’s children deserve more than that. They deserve to be believed, to be protected, and to be safe. *