Suffering Children
"It was a gang that has 5 to 21 members. These people have been ... raping boys and girls under the age of 15 and then filming them since 2009."
"It is a case of extortion. It is their business."
Kasur District Police chief Rai Babar Saeed, Hussain Khan Wala, Pakistan
"[Children as young as five are] bought, sold, rented or kidnapped and placed in organized begging rings, domestic servitude, small shops, brick kilns and prostitution."
U.S. State Department
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| "My heart sank when I saw my son in the video. Everyone in the village knew what was happening but we were too scared to do anything." Mother of abused child, Hussain Khan Wala, Pakistan -- CNN |
"My child stopped going to school; whenever they saw him, they took him into the fields, in the house", the 35-year-old mother of one victim informed CNN in an interview. "They raped him for five hours and now it's finally coming into the open."
It is a town close to the border with India, in Pakistan where families living there knew that their children were being horribly sexually abused but were too fearful to protect them. Local gangs videoed the rape of young children, believed to be 270 in number. The plan was to blackmail the families, threatening to post the videos on line or to sell them in blackmarkets for as little as 50 cents, bringing shame to the families.
It certainly says a good deal about cultural values that protecting one's 'honour' becomes more vital than protecting one's child from sexual violence. But people living in Hussain Khan Wala claim the gang forced their children at gunpoint to submit to the horrendous abuse. Or the children were drugged to make them quiescent to the abuse forced upon them. And then one single family spoke up, giving courage to others to do the same.
Trouble was, when some of the mothers went to police, the police failed to respond. The complaints were nothing particularly new or shocking to the police, evidently. "We went to the police and they did nothing. They said all our cases were the same, to bring something new for them", one mother of an abused child said, weeping in frustration and rage. "They destroyed me. They destroyed my family. They just killed me", one victim said.
The gang operated for years, forcing poor children to submit to the cruel violence of rape. In the account of one 15-year-old boy, the graphic description spoke volumes about first being raped at the age of nine when a man approached him as he was collecting water for his grandfather: "As soon as I went inside
he locked the door. He called out and five more men came in. I started
screaming and they covered my mouth. Each of them had a weapon - one had
an axe. They said they would cut me into tiny pieces if I made a single
sound. Then they raped me."
These were poor families. The gang meant the videos to be used to extort the families. Any family unable to pay was told to find another child that could be abused and filmed. A lawyer representing some of the victims, Latif Sarra, confirmed the gang filmed at least 270 children. Kasur district police chief Rai Babar Saeed spoke of confiscating 30 videos showing the sexual abuse of children young as 12. Officers drove through the town using loudspeakers to ask victims to come forward.
The case is being compared in Pakistani newspapers to a man in Lahore who in 1999 confessed to kidnapping, sexually abusing and dissolving the bodies of 100 children in acid. This Muslim country of 180 million people sees its children vulnerable to all manner of abuse where child labour is rife, and children are always at risk, particularly among the poor of whom there is no lack.
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| CNN |
Labels: Child Abuse, Pakistan, Social Dysfunction, Violence
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, August 13, 2015
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