IN Kasur district, Punjab, a gang of men sexually assaulted several children — it is still not certain how many — over several years, filmed them being abused and sold the videos to other paedophiles. Details of the abuse, which emerged some days ago after clashes between villagers and the police over the latter’s failure to arrest all the abusers, left the entire nation shocked, with people making emotional calls demanding that the perpetrators be hanged.

Child abuse is insidious in all countries and incredibly hard to eliminate. Just last month a BBC report about child abuse in the United States quoted the FBI as saying that child abuse levels are at an all-time high in that country. The report blamed “poverty, deprivation and exploitation” as the reason why thousands of American children are abused every year.

It’s obvious that poverty, deprivation and exploitation cause the same problems in Pakistan: open any newspaper on any given day and it is fairly likely that a report of child sexual abuse from somewhere in the country will jump out from the pages. A lack of willpower to prosecute criminals of all kinds — not just paedophiles — means there is no deterrent for child abusers. And Pakistan’s culture of secrecy around sexual abuse ensures that these crimes are almost never reported to the police. The recent documentary Pakistan’s Hidden Shame which examines paedophilia in Peshawar created a stir when it was released last fall, but since then, little to nothing has been done at any level to address the issues the film raised.

Sex education teaches children they have the right to say no to an abuser.

There’s even a reluctance to name the crime for what it is: someone on Twitter called it a “child disgrace scandal” rather than child sexual abuse. But this is part of the problem: only when we correctly and accurately identify the nature of the crime with openness and honesty can we take steps towards protecting our children. It involves a certain amount of courage to overcome our own taboos against speaking out about sexual matters, and right now, we haven’t got it in us. But we cannot keep our children in the dark just to keep ourselves feeling comfortable. What’s happening to our children should compel us to find that courage and overcome our reluctance to talk about it, to realise that our silence is killing our children.

Certainly a stronger justice system, with swift legal action against child abusers and harsh penalties for sexual abuse, would go a long way towards protecting all of society against child abuse, but there are too many weaknesses and loopholes of which abusers take advantage in Pakistan. Some have suggested that children should be better supervised, or kept under lock and key in the family home, but when many cases of molestation involve family members or friends committing the crime, this is also an ineffective strategy.

In order to both protect and empower our children, we need to educate vulnerable children and their parents about their sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR). This is already being done in Pakistan on a small scale, through the ambit of NGOs that focus on SRHR, but needs to be stepped up and included in school curriculums, community centres, and social development outreach all across the country. Cases like that in Kasur happen when we don’t educate our children about their sexual and reproductive health and rights.

There’s huge opposition in conservative Pakistan to sex education, with its opponents arguing that this is a Western concept, that it means we are telling our children to become sexually active at young ages. This is a fallacy. SRHR teaches children about their bodies, about what happens to them as they approach adolescence. Using programmes tailor-made for Pakistan, it teaches them in a sensitive, culturally-appropriate way about issues related to family planning and contraception, within the context of marriage. And it teaches children about sexual abuse and how to react when someone is trying to abuse or molest them. It teaches them that they have the right to say no to an abuser, something that children don’t even know because of their innocence. Predators take advantage of this innocence over and over again, but proper SRHR education would end that cycle.

These are not licentious, Western or ‘secular’ ideas. These are empowering and effective lessons which no parent should oppose out of a sense of false modesty. They teach our children and adolescents how to protect themselves when we can’t be around to protect them ourselves. Had the children of Kasur been taught this, they might have spoken up earlier about what was happening to them, and some of these cases may have been prevented. It’s too late for them, but it isn’t too late for the rest of Pakistan’s children. And some of them might even be yours.

The writer is the author of A Season For Martyrs.

Twitter:@binashah

Published in Dawn, August 16th, 2015

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