Amid the
swirling horrors of an unabated spate of child abductions, child pornography
rings, incessant child sexual abuse, rape and murder, and numerous other
excesses against society’s most defenseless members a mere fraction of which
get reported, one would imagine that the country would be preparing to go to
war in the protection of its future, i.e. our children.[1]
Parliament (and provincial assemblies) would be scrambling to debate the merits
of current legislation, pushing through more effective laws and holding the
state apparatus to account on implementation. The media, with their monopoly on
national opinion-making, would bring their massive influence to bear on making
the plight of the child the no. 1 burning issue in the public’s collective attention.
Society at large would engage in mass soul-searching to identify and root out
the causes, circumstances and societal contradictions that pave the way for our
children being brutalized, physically and psychologically.
What we have
instead is a spokesperson for the party-in-power appearing on prime-time TV to
correct facts: only 132, and not 700 or more, children are missing without a
trace from Lahore since the beginning of 2016. And that somehow makes
everything better. Senior police officials conclude that most missing children
are runaways from home and not really kidnapped. But surely, there are at least
a few that have been abducted in broad daylight without as much as a ransom
call or note. There are rumors of an organ-harvesting network in operation. If
that is true, it is surely being abetted by qualified medical workers and
customs and police officials. What is the breadth and intensity of the
investigation if the default setting is: he ran away from home? If the glorious
guardians of our national consciousness, the Parliament and other law-making
bodies, cannot convene to consider, e.g. how a Criminal Procedure Code given by
our colonial masters in 1898 is still valid today; why laws made for Child
Protection in recent years have remained largely toothless especially in the
context of federal legislation and provincial execution; why children-specific
bills are needed based on scientific studies investigating whether things like
rape, emotional and physical trauma and being exploited have different
long-term physical and psychological impact on adults and children; and, how do
you even define a child in this class-, sect- and caste-crazed society, let
them at least sit together and decide upon an arbitrary national threshold of
tolerability for abducted/raped children. 132 is good enough. Heaven forbid if
it were ever to be 133.[2]
[3]
[4]
The apathy
of our power elites (media included) towards anything other than the high-drama
of political power-play is nothing out of the ordinary. While the elite
unabashedly exhibits callous disregard, the people seem to suffer from mass
denial bordering on self-delusion. A standard refrain is, especially in the
context of child sexual abuse, that when the phenomenon is rampant in
‘developed’ Western nations, how can Pakistan be expected to eradicate it. This
line especially hurts when coming from good-hearted, well-meaning people. My
only question to such people is, isn’t the decadent West only just materially advantaged
while we, as a nation, have always prided ourselves on being more spiritually
and morally upright? Isn’t the basic premise for our entire national existence
the religion of Islam? Nothing is more symptomatic of a diseased soul than
raping, seducing, or otherwise molesting, a child. Shouldn’t our superior
spiritual strengths have ensured the minimal incidence of such vile crimes in
our society vis-à-vis the immoral West that is going to hell anyway despite its
material advantages? Or should we admit that there is also a disease within our
souls that begs to be treated with all the scientific and spiritual remedies
available to us in the 21st century.
For
perspective, my reading of history leads me to believe, that pederasty, i.e. a
sexual preference for young boys, is not as much a legacy of our Hindu
heritage, blamed as it is for most social ills in present-day Pakistan, as it
is of our cherished Arabian-Persian-Turkic tradition. While ancient Hinduism is
rife with the abominable tradition of child marriages, objective accounts from
Mughal, Ottoman, Abbasid and Persian courts and the life-stories of notable
rulers, warriors, poets and even revered saints point to a vast history of
pederasty in this region. Countries like Afghanistan are also still grappling
with the ramifications of this widely and openly practiced phenomenon, locally
known as ‘Bacha Baazi’.[5]
[6]
Interestingly, boys who have been thus exploited are culturally expected to go
on and inflict the same upon others as they themselves grow into adulthood.
This forms a vicious chain that is unending across generations. From a six-year
old boy hanging dead after being sodomized on the second floor of a mosque to
the largely-forgotten depredations of the Kasur and Swat child pornography
rings to the hastily-hushed and hardly ever investigated rumors surrounding our
religious seminaries to the regular nuggets on the periphery of the daily news,
it is about time we wake up to this hideous reality, this inherited malaise
that afflicts us. This is not to say, of course, that girl-children are any safer
in Pakistan. Data suggests that no child-type is safe from sexual predators in
our country; rich or poor, boy or girl, disabled or orphaned, housed or
homeless.[7]
In 2007,
Iranian President Ahmedinejad made an international mockery of himself by
claiming that there were no homosexuals in his country.[8]
By turning a blind eye to how children in Pakistan are suffering just because
the fire has not come home yet, many of us stand to make similar fools of
ourselves, especially in the realms of conscience. Not everything from Javed
Iqbal, serial rapist and murderer of over a 100 children in Lahore in the 90s,
to the current, uninhibited row of unexplained kidnappings, is an anomalous
stain on the beautiful face of our country that will go away by itself. Only
after mustering the courage to recognize the issue can the urgently needed conversation
on how elitism, socioeconomic stratification, wage disequilibrium, systemic
governance failures, notions of shame and honor, clerical irresponsibility, broken
and displaced families, absence of a social security net, dysfunctional gender
attitudes and educational systems, and the lack of a sense of collective social
responsibility towards children, all feed into leaving our children so
vulnerable to exploitation.[9]
And this conversation needs to occur at all echelons of society. Comparisons
with other countries or arguing over incidence figures represent a defeatist,
self-serving policy that undermines an unambiguous, absolutely uncompromising
attitude that any self-respecting people should have as to the protection of
their children.
We, in the
present-day, are custodians of our future in the form children that we are
bringing up. Children are the weakest members of society, needing an external
voice to articulate their needs and protect their human rights as they lack the
intellectual and physical capacity themselves. No code of human decency,
religious or secular, looks kindly upon a people who stand in brazen disregard
of the plight of the weakest among them. More poignantly, no society that
remains in denial about gross injustice within itself has any right to harbor
any self-gratifying notions of grandeur, material or spiritual.
[1] http://sahil.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FIVE-YEAR-ANALYSIS-200-2011.pdf
[2] http://www.dawn.com/news/1243231
[3] http://ombudsmanpunjab.gov.pk/children-complaint-office/child-right-acts-laws/
[4] http://www.dawn.com/news/1199985
[5] http://www.dawn.com/news/1265215
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html?_r=0
[7] http://sahil.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FIVE-YEAR-ANALYSIS-200-2011.pdf
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/sep/25/nohomosexualityhere
[9] http://tribune.com.pk/story/943616/evil-within-child-sexual-abuse-cases-rise-by-17-says-unicef-funded-study/
