The killing of a five-year-old boy in Kasur last week should not have required another headline to command attention, yet it did. His body was recovered days after he went missing, hidden close to home, bearing signs of sexual assault and strangulation. The details are disturbing. The setting is familiar. Kasur has become a recurring noun in Pakistan’s sordid tale of failure.
This was the district that shocked the country in 2018 after the rape and murder of Zainab Ansari, a case that exposed a pattern rather than a lone crime, with at least eleven incidents of abuse preceding her killing. What followed was public anger, hurried legislation and solemn assurances that the state would respond faster the next time a child disappeared. That “next time” has kept knocking at the conscience door, only to be met with buzzwords, task forces and press conferences. None of it altered outcomes.
Sahil recorded more than 3,350 cases of violence against children in 2024, nearly nine a day, of which Punjab accounts for the majority. Compiled from police records and media reports, these dark numbers describe a persistent risk environment in which abuse is neither rare nor unpredictable.
The Zainab Alert, Recovery and Response Act was framed as a tool to compress time in exactly such cases. Its logic was simple: when a child goes missing, the state moves first and asks questions later. Outside Islamabad, that promise has not been operationalised.
Officials often cite FIR registration rates to show progress. The more relevant metric is what happens next. Prosecutions move slowly. Convictions remain rare. Sentences that exist on paper do not deter when certainty is absent. The system produces paperwork. Parents bury children.
There is also a social dimension that policy alone cannot erase, one in which abuse persists where silence is normalised, and disclosure carries cost. Families hesitate because communities judge. It is no secret that our children are taught obedience long before they are taught boundaries, and predators operate comfortably within this silence. The state’s delays do not interrupt this cycle. They reinforce it.
What is missing is integration. Child protection remains scattered across police stations, welfare departments, courts and education systems that do not communicate with one another, operating as isolated silos rather than a single protective chain. Training for first responders varies by district. Schools distribute awareness material without building reporting pathways. Each institution performs its part, yet no one owns the outcome.
This is a question of priorities, not capacity. Pakistan has legislated, documented and debated this issue for years, yet children remain the least empowered stakeholders in the system meant to protect them. They cannot vote, litigate or mobilise. Their safety depends entirely on whether the state treats protection as a right rather than a discretionary service.
Kasur is no longer a warning. It is a pattern that has been measured, named and ignored. How many times must it repeat before prevention replaces reaction remains the only unanswered question. *