Daily Times

Child abuse episodes that happen within the safe environment of homes and schools often go unreported. One such un-reported abuse is the story of an innocent Pakistani girl robbed of her security, safety and abuse-free life choices. She was nine years old, a second-grade student, when she found out (from a third party) that the person she had believed to be her father was, in reality, her step-father. As a good listener, she sat quietly when the third party told her further that her real father lived in another city and that she had a half-brother from her mother’s first husband. She was way too young to understand all this, but still, she listened to it like a bedtime story; not knowing much about the reality that lay beneath this web of relations. The next morning, she woke up with the story swirling in her head. She went to school thinking about what she had heard. She spent time in isolation that day in her recess. Still absorbed in the troubling question, she failed to realise that recess was over. She was called in a class by her classmate on the instruction of her teacher. She went to class freaking she was late but did not feel guilty because she knew she had not done it deliberately. She stepped in class, and the teacher rebuked her before a class full of 50 students. The teacher told her to line up against the wall for being so late. She felt utterly embarrassed and walked in shame to the end of the class where her concentration camp was waiting for her. Against the bare wall, she felt disconnected from the class and the sound of the teacher became damp in her quest to find out the truth.

She asked herself if she could trust the third person. She thought she could as she was her cousin. She wondered if she could talk to her parents, but was not sure. She knew her parents often fought over things she could not understand and if she broke this news to them, they might ignore it or scold her or fight with her cousin. In fear and the innocence of her age, she made up her mind to let the answer unfold with time. But the incident made her more vigilant and conscious about things in the household. So the next time when her parents fought in their closed room, which was adjacent to hers, she tried listening to their arguments. She could barely hear anything because either they argued hush-hushedly or the thick walls insulated their sounds. She felt helpless because her opportunity to know the fact of the matter was narrowing. In her despair, she went to the other room, motioned its locked knob and stood against it to listen. This time, with a bit of success, she heard her father scream at her mother, “Your daughter is a piece of crap just like your old husband.” Pinched and punctured, she could not believe what she had heard.

There is a pressing and exacerbating need to extend the beneficial spectrum of human rights to children

Now she was back in her room, which did not feel like a part of her home anymore. She began feeling like she belonged somewhere else. She put her face in the blanket, closed her eyes and tried to imagine she had had a nightmare. She fell asleep and in her sleep, she felt somebody caress her body. She was troubled as the touch got harsh and turned sideways to see her stepfather touching her. She realised that it was not a dream and many a time in the past, she had had such dreams.

Last year, picking up the courage after 35 years, she spoke about it over coffee. She currently works in another country as a professor of Economics and still feels horrified when remembers how she was sexually abused in her childhood. Her parents had long passed away, but she still wonders why her mother had hidden her biological father’s identity and why she could not take refuge with her family or state apparatus. She said that it was not easy to talk about childhood abuse, and she was only able to talk about it now when she was a 44-year-old working woman who had settled abroad. She revealed that the abuse had faded away, but its harm still lingered in the form of a strange fear of men. This explained her decision to not get married. She told me with a smirk that at home, her unmarried status was still seen by some as a mark of feminism but only she knew that it was a mark of childhood abuse-led choice.

Her story is a singular episode of harm but unfolds manifold harms that the girls of our society face in safe places like schools and homes. Stories like these convince me to say that there is a pressing and exacerbating need to extend the beneficial spectrum of human rights to children. Children, just like adults, are moral agents and as such, qualify to rights including that to a safe home, freedom from harassment in private and public, freedom from exposure to indecent information, freedom from judgement and freedom from verbal and physical abuse. To guarantee these, it is important to distribute responsibility among three stakeholders. The first and foremost are parents. It is their moral duty to provide their children with an abuse-free environment and build a friendly environment where children can talk to their parents about any harm–whether done in the contours of home or outside. It is then the educational duty of institutions to teach children about abuse and encourage them to talk to counsellors on campus, who can then arrange a meeting with the parents to address the issue. If the abuse recurs after three consistent meetings with the children, the matter should be reported to the police authorities for prosecution under anti-child abuse law. Until the efforts of these stakeholders are combined with those of law-makers, our country will keep on facing the child-abuse challenge because many such cases go unreported and never become the spotlight of news. It is, therefore, requested that parents, educational institutions and law enforcement agencies play their part in helping the lawmaker minimise childhood abuse and childhood-led choices.

The writer is a law graduate of the University of London and teaches Jurisprudence & Legal Theory