It has been two weeks since Zainab Ansari’s dead body was found in Kasur.

The news
that a seven-year-old child could be raped and murdered, in a city that had already
endured a massive child pornography ring reported on in 2015, was shocking. Protests
ensued in Kasur; anger, and rage around the rest of the country. #JusticeforZainab was
the hashtag. Within twenty-four hours of Zainab’s body being found, other cases of
sexual assault, rape and murder of children began to emerge.

The Punjab government, which prides itself on responsiveness and use of technology,
can build new metro lines in a matter of months, but cannot find and punish the child
pornographers and rapists of Kasur. It is an outrage. There are no quick fixes for the
kinds of problems that produce the vulnerability of children like Zainab, but there are
some easy and obvious things that Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif can start with.

There is now so much reportage on a PML-N MPA’s alleged role in helping free
suspects in the 2015 child rape and pornography ring, that continuing to ignore it
indicates an unwillingness to genuinely create a safer environment for the children of
the Punjab. An independent inquiry commission that is not headed by people
belonging to the sitting government must be formed to explore why the 2015 case did
not produce safety for Kasur’s children.

Of course, the scalp of one MPA is not a material gain in the struggle to reform state
and society. But any MPA that is able to survive his or her active engagement in
abetting crimes of this nature only indicates an embrace of the moral collapse that
many already accuse Pakistani democracy of. Digging into why the 2015 Kasur case
did not produce more robust and longer-lasting protection for children is the very
minimum that the Punjab government owes its children.

Columnists have pointed out that, while the federal government, the provincial
governments and even the judiciary have all been making progress on addressing
child sexual abuse and exploitation in a variety of ways, a mountain of work needs to
be done to address the wide array of challenges this problem poses.
The Punjab government has constituted a Committee on Safeguarding Children (full
disclosure: I was included on this committee, though have yet been unable to attend
its several meetings since last week). This committee has produced three sub-
committees, one to work on the adoption of an ‘amber’ alert system that helps identify
and find victims quickly, a second that examines the need for changes to existing legal
and criminal procedures, and a third that is supposed to examine school curricula and
ways and means for wider societal awareness about child sexual abuse and
exploitation.

All of these quick measures are important and they reflect the sincerity of purpose that
exists among the many senior officials in Punjab, including the chief minister, that
want to make things better. This is the good news.

The bad news is that none of these measures can address the white, hot core of the
problem. Children like Zainab in Kasur, and Asma in Mardan are not vulnerable
because of the system failed. They are vulnerable because the existing system works.
The vulnerability of Pakistani children is hardwired into state and society. No matter
how many notices the chief minister of a province takes, no matter how many suo-
motu cases the chief justice initiates, and no matter how many tickers, updates and
tweets such outrages generate, the grand compact that is the basis for our day to day,
year to year, and decade to decade existence includes a proactive disregard for
children. This cannot be solved with any of the tools that are available to Pakistan
today. Not with Punjab speed, nor with a justice tsunami, nor indeed with a gaggle of
retired technocratic uncles, or angry three and four-star officers. Tackling the crisis of
Pakistani children requires an examination of the fundamentals of state and society. If
we keep misdiagnosing our problems, we will keep failing to solve them.

Every urban area in the country teems with child labour, child beggars, street children,
out-of-school children, and dropouts. Where have these children come from? From
parents for whom reproductive rights are almost entirely contingent on the fertility of
the male partner. Female agency in the reproductive process is, despite huge advances
in addressing the balance of power between genders, extremely limited – especially as
we proceed down the totem pole of wealth, income and consumption.

It is hard to ascertain exactly what quantum of unsafe and unreported abortions take
place in Pakistan every day. Many people who read English newspapers, regardless of
their disposition in terms of social values, would be shocked to speak to doctors in
cheap, makeshift private medical facilities across the country. Specialists in the field
of reproductive health are anxious about engaging in a public dialogue about the
problem, because it would require acknowledging the existence of two substantial
realities: married women who simply do not want to continue their pregnancies, and
unmarried women who cannot, regardless of their own sentiments, continue their
pregnancies. Both represent challenges to discourse in a country where public policy
must be, both constitutionally, and politically, consistent with broad notions of
religious virtue. To tackle this requires leadership that is not so much bold as it is
willing to plan and execute a course of action that satisfies the moral and ethical
demands of safety and security for women and children as well as the constitutional
and political demands of Islamic values.

Complicated pregnancies, no matter how prevalent, represent a small fraction of the

cohort of children conceived every day in Pakistan. Upon conception, what kind of
treatment do we mete out to them? Maternal nutritional health, which begins to affect
the cognitive capacity of an embryo by the third month of gestation, is second nature
to the well-off, but an oddity among those less fortunate. Malnutrition statistics in
Pakistan tell the story better than any amalgam of words can. According to the 2011
National Nutrition Survey, a quarter of all children below five years of age are
severely stunted (low height for their age), 17 percent of all children suffer from
wasting (low weight for their age), and 31 percent of all children are underweight for
their age. The resultant cognitive challenges should not be difficult to predict.
Pakistani children score poorly in every measure of learning outcomes, at every level.

These disadvantages are hardwired into the analysis before we even begin to engage
with child safety in the context of school enrolment, school to home distances,
teachers’ awareness and accountability, and child safety in the home, especially in
large, joint family households.

To address this requires a conversation about how society is organised and why the
state exists. If the purpose of a society is to worship the rich and the purpose of the
state is to fight anyone that questions it, then there is nothing wrong with Pakistan. If
the purpose of a society is to protect the weak and vulnerable and to create a brighter
future, and the purpose of the state is to fuel such a future, then much work needs to
be done.

Until there is a critical mass of Pakistanis that insist on a rethink and reform of the
fundamentals of this country, Pakistan’s elite – civilian, military, religious and sundry
– will continue to jump from one crisis to the next, sometimes deliberately
obfuscating the issues, sometimes genuinely failing to tackle them. We can either
follow them into each rabbit hole, coming up empty every time, or we can stand our
ground and demand a rethink and reform of the fundamentals. We are not powerless
consumers of the stupidity of the elite. We can do better. For ourselves and for every
child in this country.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.

www.mosharrafzaidi.com

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