A worrying pattern seems to be emerging in the country where the institutions meant to keep people safe are actually becoming places of danger for the people and police stations seem to be part of this disturbing trend. An assistant sub-inspector (ASI) has been accused of allegedly sexually assaulting a girl with an intellectual disability inside Lahore’s Ghaziabad police station. The accused allegedly brought the girl from her home to the police station before taking her into a room, where the alleged assault took place. The police said the ASI had told the girl’s family that she was wanted in connection with a case. Following the incident, the entire Ghaziabad police station staff was suspended and police authorities have stated that a complete investigation is under way and that no official found negligent will be granted any leniency. The details of these allegations are absolutely harrowing.
What is perhaps most disturbing about this case is that the accused apparently felt comfortable in carrying out the assault at the station, which is meant to be a pillar of law enforcement. There are several ways to look at this. One is how institutions in this country somehow end up perpetuating the very things that they are meant to stop and how this erodes public trust in the whole system, something which creates problems of its own and can even get in the way of the good work institutions do. The second, of course, is just how dangerous a place Pakistan can be for its most vulnerable citizens and no one is more vulnerable than children. According to child protection NGO Sahil’s latest report, a total of 1,914 cases of child abuse were reported in newspapers over the first six months of the current year. And these are just the cases that made it into the news, which, unfortunately, many such cases often do not. As it stands, Pakistan is doing an abysmal job of protecting its children, to say nothing about the disabled.
However, unlike the allegations that have surfaced in the Ghaziabad case, the Sahil report claims that nearly half of the child abuse cases it covered (45 per cent) took place at the victim’s own residence and that, in most of the crimes committed against children, abusers are related or known to the children or the family. The nation got a reminder of this depressing fact earlier this week when a teenage boy in Karachi allegedly raped a girl aged a year-and-a-half, a relative of his, and caused her death. If children are not even safe in their homes and among the people they know, then where are they safe? Both what happened in Ghaziabad and Karachi require a comprehensive, properly implemented child-and-women protection strategy. To the extent that such strategies and related laws are already in place, they are clearly not working well enough. Above all, we must make sure the law-enforcement officers who will be charged with doing much of the work in this case are not themselves committing such crimes.
