Damaged childhoods

CHILD abuse is so prevalent that the UN ranked Pakistan as the least safe country for children. Even so, more than five years after the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Act, 2020 — Pakistan’s first national child protection law — central provisos, including the agency for rapid alerts for missing children, are lifeless due to shoddy implementation. The Islamabad High Court has taken notice of data from the ICT administration — 562 criminal cases relating to missing children and child abuse were registered in Islamabad between 2022 and 2025 — and ordered the human rights ministry to present a report on 11 areas of concern. It has also asked for legal mechanisms for victims, the constitution of the ICT Child Protection Advisory Board and the assimilation of the Zainab Alert Act database with Islamabad Police. Named after little Zainab, whose brutal rape and murder in Kasur shook the country, this law was to serve as a lifeline. Instead, a rise in child abuse cases has been recorded.

A toxic societal cycle that protects offenders and treats the abhorrent crime as a private affair only darkens the setting — on average, 11 children were abused daily in Pakistan in 2023. This is just the reported number. Battling child abuse is a complex process; the combination of police lethargy and weak institutions renders implementation virtually absent. The result is a system that cannot rescue children who are being exploited within and outside family contexts. Greater political focus towards awareness, conviction rates and strengthened vigilance, together with improved child services can ensure justice. While the Act, in line with the tenets of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by Pakistan, serves the well-being of our young, the aspect of psychological recovery must not stay peripheral. When justice is an outcome of mass rage, protests and hashtags that grip global attention, innocence is either at risk or lost.

Published in Dawn, June 8th, 2026

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