Three minor girls abducted in Karachi one and a half months ago are believed to have been trafficked to a feudal lord in Larkana and languishing in his private jail since. Fourteen-year-old Sabeena, 10-year Nageena and 10-year Soorat were kidnapped in Banghoria Goth in Azizabad and taken to the private jail. According to police sources, an influential feudal lord of the Shikarpur district was behind the trafficking of the girls.They said the local police did not dare raid the private jail because “the law of the jungle still prevails in the interior of Sindh”. A large number of people, including the parents and relatives of the girls, staged a protest demonstration in front of the Karachi Press Club on Thursday, and demanded of the Sindh government to rescue them. When the horrific scandal of Kasur’s paedophilic ring that victimised hundreds of children over the years was exposed two months ago, one could be forgiven for trying to look for a silver lining in the sordid affair by hoping that at long last the public, the media and the political class would be jolted into coming face to face with Pakistani society’s disfigured underbelly and proactive actions would be taken to redress the state’s abysmal and heart wrenching neglect of ensuring the safety of its most vulnerable segment of the population, children. However, not even an ounce of introspection over allowing the abusive perversions of the rich and powerful by institutionally complicit law enforcement agencies was evident nor was any movement to unpack the dangerous reluctance of wider society to engage in productive discussion about uncomfortable realities started. Instead, we bore witness to a sound and fury that reduced the problem to the antics of the few; a few days of bloodthirsty moralising on the airwaves and a rigged committee whose investigation manifested nothingness. Later the matter was conveniently out of sight and out of mind. In the popular imagination, Kasur has been dismissed as an aberration and thus the scandal was never allowed to be a harbinger of reform in the functioning of vital state institutions, in our attitudes towards child protection or in the way we as a society conceive of incidencts of sexual violence. The anguished voices and traumatised existence of thousands of victimised children around the country thus continue to be muffled as society contently keeps its head in the sand and avoids confronting the harsh realities that allow such rampant abuses to continue unfettered.
pk.shafaqna.com
