KARACHI, July 30: A 12-year-old girl, who is accused of theft, has been sent to the Special Prison for Women, where adult women are imprisoned, it is learnt. Shabana, daughter of Asghar, used to work as a domestic helper and her employers had accused her of stealing jewellery worth thousands of rupees.

A case was registered against Shabana and one of her relatives, Nasreen, wife of Mumtaz, under section 380/411 at the Sharea Faisal police station. Responding to Dawn’s queries, the Superintendent of the Special Prison for Women, Sheeba Shah, said 12-year-old Shabana and Nasreen were brought to the jail and were imprisoned there. They are facing theft charges, she added.

Replying to another question, she said another young girl Anna, who was an Iranian, was also in prison. Anna, who is either 12 or 13 years old, was arrested in the Tharparkar district along with her parents while crossing over to India.

They were tried, convicted and imprisoned. They have completed their sentence but were still languishing in jail, as they did not want to return to Iran, the jail official added. She said that since there was no separate facility for young girls, they were kept in the same jail along with adult women – convicted as well as under trial prisoners.

However, there is a separate prison for boys — the Youthful Offenders Industrial School — where boys between 16 and 18 years are kept. While boys younger than 16 are kept in a Remand Home, as laws relating to juveniles and children prohibit keeping children in prisons with adults to protect them from sexual exploitation.

Sources said that though the government had established a separate prison for young boys, no such facility had been developed for girls, who like the young boys could also be vulnerable to exploitation from other adult inmates.