On May 31, 2020, an eight-year-old domestic worker was brought to Begum Akhtar Rukhsana Memorial Hospital in Rawalpindi. The child’s employers had brutally assaulted her for mistakenly releasing two costly parrots from their cage — which were apparently worth more than her life.

At the hospital, she was put on ventilator, but succumbed to her injuries on June 1 — that child was Zohra Shah.

It has been three years since that incident.

She had met the same fate as the 11-year-old boy from Lahore who was ‘caught’ eating food from his employer’s fridge, of 15-year-old Mohammad Imran, a child domestic worker (CDW) who was strangled in 2018, and that of 16-year-old Uzma who was tortured and murdered by her employers in 2019 for allegedly helping herself to a small piece of meat.

In Zohra’s case, the public outcry had all but dissipated a few weeks after the employers were detained — after all justice had been served and it was time to put this incident behind us. Many people might not even remember her today.

But it’s important to ask where we stand now, three years after that incident?

Domestic child labour laws across Pakistan

On Sept 13, 2021, Pakistan passed The Islamabad Capital Territory Domestic Workers Bill, 2021 — ratified into an Act in 2022 — banning child labour in domestic work under any circumstance. The law is, however, applicable in the federally administered territory only, with provincial governments yet to follow suit.

In Punjab, the Punjab Domestic Workers Act 2019 specifies the minimum age for employment as 15 years. According to the Act, a child between 15-18 years of age may be employed only for light work. Light work is defined as “all such activities which don’t negatively impact a child’s health, security and education”.

It also states that a domestic worker shall not be employed under the bonded labour system, and the employer shall provide them with dignified working conditions along with occupational safety and health measures. It mandates the registration of domestic workers with the Punjab Employees’ Social Security Institution and states that a worker cannot be required to perform work which isn’t specified in their contracts.

The Sindh Prohibition of Employment of Children Act, 2017 and the Prohibition of Employment of Children Act, 2015, of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, both set the minimum age for labour at 14 years.

The Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) requires each member state to ensure that the work performed by domestic labourers under the age of 18, but above the minimum age of employment, doesn’t deprive them of compulsory education or interfere with their opportunities to participate in further education.

How do the laws translate beyond paper?

Pakistan lacks strong, integrated enforcement mechanisms for legislative and policy frameworks on child labour. Despite laws being in place, the reality on the ground remains unchanged. Contracts for domestic work are virtually non-existent in Pakistan — it would perhaps be a fair question to ask whether the lawmakers themselves abide by this condition. Structural health measures for domestic workers too seem like a distant reality.

Lack of written contracts puts CDWs at the mercy of employers. Young and vulnerable children depend on the honesty and goodwill of the employers to be given pay and good working conditions. They also aren’t often privy to the terms and conditions from their employers regarding the recruitment.

A 2004 study by the ILO found that 264,000 children were working in domestic labour, however, more recent projections (up to 2014) estimated the number at 14 million children.

The ILO estimates that one in every four households in Pakistan employs a child in domestic work, predominantly girls, aged 10 to 14 years, showing just how prevalent and normalised the phenomenon remains.

Punjab has launched a door-to-door campaign in selected districts to identify and register domestic workers, aiming to enable their access to social protection. However, as of early 2021, only 14,717 domestic workers in Punjab were registered.

Glaringly, many CDWs are employed as resident workers, which means that they live with their employer. They often do not have access to cell phones, and very restricted contact with their families and anyone beyond the confines of the home. This also means that they do not have strict working hours and can be subjected to work at any time of the day. Most of all, however, this increases the risk of sexual abuse from the employer’s family, other or older house help, and even visitors.

With the Covid-19 pandemic and the following economic shutdown, the situation worsened. Due to Covid-19 lockdowns, CDWs were separated from their families for longer periods of time and were at an increased risk of sexual, physical and emotional abuse.

Since 2020, multiple cases of abuse have been reported, with the victims being domestic helpers under the age of 15. On May 5, it was reported by a local media outlet that a 12-year-old domestic helper in Karachi had been beaten by the house owner after she had mistakenly dropped a frying pan full of hot oil — the girl also sustained burn injuries as a result.

It is worthwhile to note that for the most part, people refrain from reporting such cases and they go undisclosed in the media, either due to the nature of the abuse, or the social position of the employers.

According to a report that compiled the statistics of abuse, torture, rapes and murders of CDWs across the country from the media over the past decade, 96 children have been tortured and raped, and 44 have been murdered. Of these 140 children, 48 (34 per cent) children were 10 years old and below, 56 (40pc) children between 11 to 14 years old and 36 (26pc) children between 15 to 18 years old.

Moreover, the report states that of the 140 cases, “79 per cent were reported from Punjab, 14 per cent from Sindh, six per cent from Islamabad and one percent from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.”

It is once again essential to point out that it is illegal to employ a child below the age of 14. And yet, over 104 children under the age of 14 were murdered in the past decade, and these are only numbers that have been reported in the media.

Combatting modern-day slavery in Pakistan

Due in part to a lack of political will and extensive community acceptance of child labour in domestic employment, policy implementation is still difficult. Although numerous organisations, governments, and sectors are engaged in the fight against child labour, there is no unified strategy or plan in place.

The recommendations in the scoping study by the ILO state that laws and policies need to be formulated using a bottom-up approach. This approach in policymaking involves the people at the grassroots level in the decision-making process who have a better understanding of the underlying causes of child labour and the specific needs and challenges of their community. With a better understanding of the problem, affected communities can come up with more effective solutions that are culturally appropriate and take into account the unique needs of their community.

Overwhelmingly, these cases emerge from the households of powerful men and women. It is not a matter of awareness, since many of these people belong to what are considered ‘upper-class’ and ‘respected’ professions such as businessmen, judges, military officials and doctors, who are well-versed and well-travelled. What it seems to be is a matter of entitlement over another being, of not seeing children as children. There is an urgent need for a paradigm-shift and conversations about the rights of workers and children, to be able to recognise child labour as something wrong in the first place, in order for authorities to take serious action against it.

Schooling and child labour are inextricably linked. In the words of Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi, “We will not end child labour until every child is in school, and we will not succeed in ensuring every child is in school until we eradicate child labour”.

Elimination of tuition fees, free textbooks, uniforms and school transportation, as well as the implementation of in-kind transfer initiatives like food for education and conditional cash transfer programmes can encourage parents to send their children to schools.

In order to limit and regulate child labour with the ultimate goal of eradicating this phenomenon we, as a society — or as people who accept this practice as inhumane — must play our part.

No matter how culturally ingrained the practice might be, we must not become desensitised to it. Whether it’s sponsoring a child’s education or contacting the relevant authorities in case of an underage child being employed in your neighbourhood or family, let’s play our part.

Let us, for once, not wait for a child to be killed to raise our voices.

Header image: Sheece Khan/Dawn.com