Daily Times

Rizwan* was four-years old when he came to the Child Protection and Welfare Bureau in Gujranwala. He sat huddled in a corner with his knees drawn up to his chin, and his palms pressed tightly against his ears to keep out the incessant din of other children playing during the lunch hour. He shrieked when the noise got too loud. Whenever he saw a policeman or a guard in uniform, his little body snapped to attention; he drew himself up to his full height, and saluted the uniformed figure with all the solemnity a four-year-old could muster. He detested large open spaces and crowds, and he thought his dormitory was too big.

Before he came to the children’s home, Rizwan had grown up in a women’s prison. His mother was incarcerated before he was born. According to the law, she was allowed to keep her son in prison with her until he turned six.

In practice, many children end up staying with their mothers till they are 10-years-old. This is often because the mother has committed a crime such as murder or assault against someone in her family, and cannot find a relative to take in her child. Most imprisoned women refuse to trust strangers in orphanages and welfare bureaus to care for their children, and prison authorities let them keep their kids out of laziness, leniency, or a combination of the two.

When I first heard about Rizwan’s story, I was stunned at the parallels I could draw with Room, Emma Donaghue’s novel written from the perspective of a five-year-old child who grows up confined to a single room. But this was not a case of dystopian fiction; this was the story of just one of several children growing up confined in a couple of rooms and corridors.

For a child in the formative stages of development, such a confinement can have disastrous consequences. Prisons in Pakistan are overcrowded and underfunded. Most kids do not have access to separate facilities or schools, and there is no attempt to maintain a sense of normalcy. Their diets are insufficient, and they are vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. The filthy conditions at prisons put them at risk of contracting a stew of infectious diseases. According to a statement released by Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), many children have been delivered without pre- or post-natal care, and several mothers and children have contracted scabies.

These children grow up in cramped spaces and have little to no interaction with people besides the prison staff and inmates. This narrows their worldview to a frightening degree, stunting their development and leaving them incapable of understanding or interacting with the larger world outside the prison walls.

And yet this practice continues unabated. In prisons where authorities let children stay with mothers beyond the stipulated six years, officials claim this is better than the alternative. But cases like Rizwan disclose an entirely different reality; even four years or less in a prison are long enough to render a child incapable of leading a ‘normal’ life when set free.

When prison authorities refuse to delay the inevitable, and children are finally placed in the custody of relatives or shelters, they struggle to assimilate or learn in school. They are suddenly wrenched from their primary caregivers. There are no follow up visits, and no data to indicate what happens to them after they are released. There is no psychological help for children placed in the care of relatives, although Child Welfare Bureaus usually have psychologists on staff.

In most developed countries, female prisoners are not allowed to keep their young children with them. In the rare instances where this practice persists, mothers are given access to special facilities for their children

Rizwan went to visit his mother frequently with the Bureau’s staff. On his way back from the prison, he was always inconsolable. For days afterwards, he remained agitated. Despite this, he was one of the lucky ones. A short while after he was brought to the shelter, his mother was released, and he was placed back in her custody.

The bureau’s psychologist was hopeful that with her presence, he would learn to navigate the frightening new world that had opened up to him. He was young, and malleable, and would adapt to his new environment because of the presence of his mother, and the plasticity that children his age exhibit. But a majority of the children released from jail are not reunited with their mothers for years. In 2012, Pakistan’s Ministry of Human Rights surveyed five jails, and found 68 children living with their mothers. All 68 would eventually be removed from their mothers’ protective guardianship, however limited, after being held in captivity for years.

In most developed countries, this practice has long ceased. In the rare instances where it does exist, mothers with young children are given access to special facilities. It beggars belief that there is no substantial effort to remove children from prisons in a country where prisons are not even suitable for adult inmates.

No matter how frightening they find the prospect of placing their child in an orphanage or welfare bureau, incarcerated women should not be allowed to keep their children with them. Our policy makers need to recognise that keeping children close to their parents who are incarcerated is not beneficial. This ‘act of kindness’ irreparably stunts children’s physical and mental growth. Unless there is a massive overhaul of facilities in prisons across the country — and these children get the license to occasionally leave prison premises and interact with the outside world — they must be removed from prisons and placed in child protection bureaus in their infancy.  As long as current practice persists, our penal institutions will continue to churn out batches of mentally and emotionally scarred children.

*The name has been changed to protect identity

The writer is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Governance and Policy at ITU, and a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She can be contacted at: amna.hassan@itu.edu.pk