Daily Times

KARACHI: Friday was the last day of a week-long specialised training titled “Child Abductions and Forensic Interviewing” which was organised jointly by the United States Consulate General Karachi and the Office of the Legal Attaché Karachi.

The training curriculum was specially developed for the Sindh Police Investigators and Karachi District?Prosecutors by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Violent Crimes against Children Section’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Team and Victim Services Division, according to a statement issued on Friday.

The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) and its implementing partner the U.S Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) played an integral role in bringing this specialised training to the metropolis through their support. The Sindh Police’s Training Unit hosted the week-long training in their modern training facility at the Central Police Office in the metropolis.

The recent high profile abduction, murder and sexual exploitation of minor females in Sindh and Punjab provinces identified the urgent need for more robust training resources for Police Investigators in Karachi, Sindh Province, assigned to investigative Crimes against Children cases. This week-long training, in this regard, will further equip the Sindh Police with unique skill sets and provide additional resources that will increase the Sindh Police’s capacity to protect the children of Sindh.

According to statistics compiled by the nongovernmental organisation (NGO) SAHIL in 2017, there were over 3,345 children reported as victims of sexual abuse in Pakistan. The report further indicated that 2,077 of the victims were girls and 1,368 were boys.? Approximately 1,039 children were the victims of abductions; and 36 girls and 29 boys were brutally murdered and in some cases even tortured after they were sexually abused or exploited.? A majority of the cases reported in Pakistan were from Punjab (2,186) and Sindh (933).

As of August 2018, SAHIL reported 2,322 child abuse cases from January 2018 to June 2018. A review of the 2018 case statistics revealed that 542 children were abducted. During the same time period (January 2018 to June 2018) approximately 57 children were reported as being murdered after being abducted and sexually abused. Of the 2,322 cases reported, 56 percent of the child victims were girls and 44 percent were boys.

The horrific abduction and gruesome murder of Zainab Ansari, a seven year old from Kasur, Punjab in January 2018, galvanised Pakistan and the whole world through a social media movement that came to be known as “Justice for Zainab.” Crimes against children are no longer just a statistic or number lost in the pages of a report, instead it has brought crimes against children from the shadows and into the social conscience of Pakistan.

Published in Daily Times, October 20^th 2018.