Daily Times

Almost ten days ago, around 40
children, under the care of the Child Protection and Welfare Bureau (CPWB) Punjab, were shifted to Lahore from Faisalabad amid serious allegations of child abuse including sodomy, physical torture, harassment, forced labour and exposure to pornographic material, allegedly committed by the institution’s staff.

Striving to conform to the commitments outlined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, in 2004, the Punjab government, promulgated The Punjab Destitute and Neglected Children Act (PDNC) in order “to consolidate the law for the rescue, protective custody, care and rehabilitation of destitute and neglected children”. However, this law does not extend to children involved in criminal litigation, who are dealt with separately under the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance 2000. The CPWB was established under the PDNC with the powers to: appoint Child Protection Officers (CPO), devolve functions and powers upon Child Protection Units (CPU), and establish and maintain Child Protection Institutions (CPI). Child Protection Courts and a Children’s Welfare Fund were also created by this law.

A CPO has the power to take a destitute and neglected child into his custody and produce it before the court within 24 hours. If such a child is in the custody of his parents or guardian, the CPO cannot exercise this power but has to report the matter to the court, which may direct the child to be produced before it. When a child cannot be produced before a court immediately, he/she has to be taken to the nearest CPI until his/her production within the stipulated time. The court can order that a destitute and neglected child be admitted to a CPI or alternatively, it has the powers to entrust custody to a suitable person, subject to conditions, who is responsible for the care, education and well-being of the child, until such child attains 18 years of age.

The CPU currently has two functional units: a Rescue Operation Unit and a Family Tracing Unit. The former is involved with rescuing street children under 15 years of age, who are involved in hazardous labour, begging, drug addiction, trafficking, have been kidnapped or are lost or runaways; while the latter deals with reunification of such children with their families. While speaking to a CPO, I was told that prior to the CPU, various NGOs were facilitating the reunification process but they were levelling ‘service charges’, which in some cases were exorbitant. The CPU also takes children who have been subjected to domestic violence by employers and have subsequently run away, into custody. Most of the children, reportedly, belong to either broken or abusive homes or have been abandoned by their families or guardians. These children are admitted in CPIs that are functioning in seven districts of Punjab, with two facilities for girls in Lahore and Gujranwala, and are provided shelter, food, clothing, education, healthcare, counselling and recreation.

Institutional abuse is not a phenomenon that is peculiar to Pakistan or the developing countries; it happens everywhere in the world. Taking place in care/nursing homes, hospitals, orphanages, boarding schools, youth detention centres or protective residential facilities, it can take place in the form of neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, discriminatory abuse, psychological and emotional abuse and/or financial abuse.

The CPWB website acknowledges child abuse as human rights violations and a massive barrier to ‘child survival and development’ and an impediment to normal development. The CPI employees charged with abuse have alleged that the bureau’s head for Faisalabad has deliberately involved them in false FIRs, since they had filed complaints against his corruption to the Home Department, by coercing the children into giving a false statement.

A perusal of the special offences given in the PDNC leaves a lot to be desired as the punishments prescribed can at best be called ‘toothless’. The maximum punishment is five years for abetting escape of a child, while other offences including ‘exposure to seduction’ carry a discretionary three years, with no mandatory minimum imprisonment prescribed for any offence whatsoever. A gaping lacuna has also been left by not making child molestation and institutional abuse an offence, in spite of the fact that this law was made in 2004. Prior to this, cases of child rape and child molestation were being tried under the Anti-Terrorist Act 1997, vide an amendment in 1999. However, there were problems, as ‘child molestation’ was not defined. A bench of the Lahore High Court directed the federal government to examine the lacunae and take some positive action; in 2001, child molestation was omitted. To date, there is no specific provision for other forms of sexual abuse, which include pornography, cyber crime against children, genital mutilation, oral sexual abuse, etc. No cases of child molestation or abuse have been tried by the Special Court since over five years. In 2002, the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan recommended an amendment in the Pakistan Penal Code by including a section 354-B, which would cover all cases of abuse and acts of molestation with a sexual motive; it was never implemented.

Child sexual abuse has been defined by the American Academy of Pediatrics as the engaging of a child in sexual activities that the child cannot comprehend, for which the child is developmentally unprepared and cannot give informed consent, and violate the social taboos of society. In general, children cannot consent to any sexual activity. A recent study suggests that emotionally and sexually abused children have problems with memory and regulation of emotions, as the development of part of the brain responsible for both is affected. This has added to previous findings that children who have been maltreated or abused have a higher risk of mental illnesses such as depression, personality disorders and anxiety and are “twice as likely to have recurrent episodes of depression in adulthood” and “are also less likely to respond well to psychological or drug-based treatments.”

According to figures based only on reported cases in newspapers, published by an NGO, 2,252 children, excluding those abducted, were sexually assaulted in 2010 but there are no figures for children who have been abused in institutions. In 2005, I was serving as a non-official visitor, appointed by the Punjab government, for all jails in Punjab. During my visit to the Borstal in Faisalabad, I was shocked to find children locked up in solitary confinement; one of them had attempted suicide by slashing himself with a razor blade and had over 40 cuts on his arms. During my talks with those children, it transpired that they were being routinely abused by the jail staff. I wrote to the Home Department and tried to follow it up with the prison authorities but like in most cases, the perpetrator was appointed the inquiry officer, who exonerated himself. Reportedly, a departmental inquiry is currently underway in the Faisalabad CPI abuse issue. I hope that the results are made public and those responsible brought to justice.

Judith Lewis Herman in her book Trauma and Recovery wrote, “Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood — establishing independence and intimacy — burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.”

It is time we acted and implemented sterner laws to curb child abuse in institutions and otherwise. Our children deserve to be protected and nurtured, so that they are never prisoners of their childhood.

The writer is an advocate of the High Court