Why Rizwanas will continue to happen

May it be the Railway or the Child Protection – the government and all its ceremonial institutions are nothing but fire-fighting vehicles seeking disaster tourism.

Brutally tortured,  grievous  head wounds, broken ribs and lacerations all across her body, Rizwana, named after the guardian angel of the Gates Of Heaven, was dumped at the back of a Rawalpindi bus stop and her parents asked to take away the mutilated  13 year old innocent child.  The sobbing parents picked up the injured daughter in their arms and  undertook an 8 hour gruelling  journey in a public bus to bring her to a government hospital in Sargodha –  only to be told that she must be taken to a yet another hospital in Lahore because of her critical condition.

Zainab, Maham, Zohra, Uzma, Erum, Tayyaba and now Rizwana attract our attention and pinch our sleepy conscience only after they have already happened.  Why have we not questioned our chronically dysfunctional child protection mechanisms?   How come  every  state institution failed to recognise that a 13 year domestic help was being barbarically tortured for six months in the capital city of Pakistan?  How come not a single individual reported the matter?  How come the Child protection agencies, the Helplines, the 1121s, the 1099s, the police, the emergency services, the hospitals and even the  ambulances of the Islamic Republic failed to come to the rescue of the tortured girl?    We however refuse to accept reality or to admit  that we do not have even an ab initio child protection system in place.

To comprehend how a child protection system works, consider this real-life event which occurred almost at the same time and date when Rizwana, was undergoing her torturous journey in a public bus.   A 13 year old child in a small town in Canada walked out of his home after a minor dispute with his  parents. A resident who saw the child walking alone on the street at an unearthly hour, realised his ‘duty to report’  and informed the police.   Within the next 10 minutes, the police had arrived, picked up the child and taken him to a police station.  The child was made to feel comfortable, asked a few verification questions and the Child Services informed. Although it was late at night, the Child Service workers promptly reached the police station and carried out a detailed interview of the child and later of the parents who were also asked to come over.   The child was allowed to go back home with the parents once the Child Service officials were fully satisfied that it was safe to do so.  Both parents and the child are being monitored  and periodically  interviewed. The seamless procedures were implemented without any intervention from any external source.

What were the factors that resulted in the immediate recovery of the child who had simply walked out of his home  in a sleepy town in Canada  and those that   concealed the child labour and torture for six months in the Capital city of Pakistan.  The first flaw lies in our ‘anecdotal’  approach to the issue of child protection.  We prefer to be seen  personally  intervening to fix the latest disaster rather than developing a self-operating preventive child protection system. This ‘band-aid’  approach ignores millions of children who are being publicly abused each day, while we wait for the next tragedy to happen.

The second critical discrepancy is our  failure  to adopt a ‘duty to report’ law for mandatory reporting of child abuse cases.   Although hundreds of people knew about the 13 year old Rizwana being  used as child labour for past six months,  they chose to remain silent.  Pakistan could have a sea change impact on child protection by declaring that every citizen and professional has a mandatory ‘duty to report’ any instance of child abuse and neglect to police or the Child Protection department.  This includes a child found begging,  lost,  abandoned or working  in any domestic or commercial establishment.

The third missing link is the complete absence of well defined and documented response procedures / actions that ought to be  seamlessly linked and followed by police and the Child protection officers, on receiving a child abuse report. Currently we have a dead system that works only when prompted  by phone calls from higher-ups  or influential individuals.  Even after such procedures are developed,  they will work only when massively disseminated  amongst public at large through repeated messages on TV, newspapers and websites.

Finally we fail to understand that child  abuse is heavily fueled by poverty.  Rizwana would not have been palmed off  to work for 12 hours a day for Rs10,000 per month, had her father  been receiving a decent minimum legal wage or EOBI.  No child protection system can succeed when millions of people are willing to sell their children.  Will the sane  and pro-poor citizens come together to build a movement for a holistic child protection system in Pakistan?

Naeem Sadiq