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Child kidnapping cases on the rise in Pakistani Punjab
Authorities in Pakistan’s most populous province of Punjab have set up a task force to address an alarming rise in child abductions, with official figures recording nearly 2,000 cases since 2015.
Authorities in Pakistan’s most populous province of Punjab have set up a task force to address an alarming rise in child abductions, with official figures recording nearly 2,000 cases since 2015.
Figures released by the Punjab government showed more than 1,200 kidnappings were reported last year. The figures for 2016 are just as alarming – 767 children have been kidnapped so far, mostly from Lahore, Faisalabad, Bahawalpur and Bahawalnagar.
A separate police report said 1,808 children were kidnapped since last year. Police claims that most of these children were recovered have been rejected by civil society activists, who allege that officials are giving false recovery figures.
Several videos that have surfaced on social media feature footage of children being kidnapped from outside their homes or from busy shopping centres.
The number of unreported cases is believed to be much higher, as families of victims tend to avoid taking help from law enforcement agencies.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent body, alleges that a number of children end up in camps where they are trained to become beggars. “This is a roaring business and children seem to earn more money than adults,” says HRCP chairperson Zohra Yusuf.
Punjab’s law minister Rana Sanaullah, a senior leader of the PML-N that is in power in the province and the centre, says some gangs are involved in the kidnappings.
The government claims as many as 721 of the 767 children kidnapped this year were recovered and had rejoined their families. However, there was no mention that many of these children ended up as beggars or were left at ‘mazars’ (mausoleums) across the country where they usually ended up becoming sex workers.
Punjab Police chief Mushtaq Ahmad Sukhera says the kidnapping of children “was not a serious issue” and the matter had been wrongly portrayed by the media because most of the children ran away from their homes due to the “harsh attitudes” of their parents.
He claims police have recovered many runaway children from railway stations, bus stands and shrines in big cities.
