Runaway children

Published August 11, 2016

REPORTS of a surge in kidnapping of children or their disappearance due to other causes, especially in Punjab, have caused much distress but far more outrageous has been a moribund administration’s efforts to trivialise the matter.

The National Assembly speaker was not wrong when he pontificated about child abduction being a regular feature of life in this country, only the tinge of casualness in his statement bordered on callousness. Anyone looking through the media reports since the beginning of the current year would have noted that kidnapping incidents were reported from all parts of the country and protests had been organised in several cities.

Quite a few stories described the helplessness of the families concerned, including one about a judicial officer’s breaking down in the Supreme Court over the disappearance of his son. Another report described the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister’s reply to a woman’s request for help in recovering her son — that he was waiting for the recovery of his own nephew.

What made the Supreme Court, media and the public take alarm was the admission, by the police themselves, that the abduction of children had increased in Punjab.

When the Supreme Court took notice of child abduction cases it was informed by the Punjab police that 6,793 children had been abducted or had been reported missing over six years, and 6,654 of them had been recovered. Thus, only 139 children were untraced.


It would be utterly wrong to look at runaway children only from the police’s point of view.


It also argued that child abduction was largely an urban phenomenon, caused by population explosion and migration from other areas. Lahore led the field with 44 children abducted, followed by Rawalpindi (18), with Sheikhupura (eight) and Okara (four) a distant third and fourth.

The most surprising part of the police report to the Supreme Court was a neat arithmetical breakdown of the abduction/ disappearance figures. It was said that 44.1 per cent of the children left home due to their parents’ harsh behaviour; 21.6pc were lost, and then found; 7.6pc fled due to family disputes; 6.1pc were abducted by one of the parents; 5.1pc were recovered during an attempted abduction; 4.6pc ran away due to maltreatment at the madressahs; 4.1pc were abducted by their relatives; 2.9pc went missing due to miscellaneous factors; 2.3pc were abducted for sexual abuse; and 1.6 pc were ‘abnormal’.

Leaving aside the 1.6pc of children described as ‘abnormal’ and the 21.6pc placed in the category of ‘lost and found’, 56.3pc of the children were reported missing after leaving home due to their parents’ harsh behaviour, family disputes and maltreatment at the religious seminaries. (Poverty does not occur to the police as a reason for children running away from home.) That still leaves the estimate of the number of children abducted at 20.5pc of the total. Or roughly, a little more than 1,359 children have been abducted in Punjab since Jan 1, 2011. The complacency with which these figures are rolled out is truly amazing.

The foregoing official explanation is similar to the attitude adopted by the authorities when they minimised the issue of enforced disappearances. The stock answer was that most of the ‘missing’ people had voluntarily gone to join jihad in Afghanistan or had run away from difficult circumstances. The same approach is visible in efforts to allay public anxiety and anger at disappearance of children for one reason or another.

The police report does not disclose how many of the 6,654 children recovered over the last six years, out of the 6,793 that were listed as abducted/ missing, returned home on their own or with the help of non-official agencies and how many were recovered by the police or any other law-enforcement agency, apart from the 5.1pc recovered during the process of abduction. That the police sometimes does effectively intervene in cases of abduction/ disappearance cannot be denied. This year they look notice of at least a couple of cases of children recovered by parents after paying ransom and were able to nab the culprits. But such efforts need to be made part of a properly thought-out strategy and concerted action.

We are, at the moment, concerned about the large number of children who run away from their homes and institutions. The police should be interested in watching these runaway children because they could be recruited by criminal gangs or at least swell the ranks of street children.

Yet it would be utterly wrong to look at runaway/ street children only from the police’s point of view. The state must recognise its responsibility of reclaiming such children. For instance, the fact that children run away from educational institutions, including religious seminaries, should persuade the provincial education bosses to remove the students’ grievances — such as teachers’ resort to violence, sexual abuse, lack of seriousness about proper instruction, et al.

Similarly, the state’s duty to protect the interests of runaway/ street children cannot be limited to putting them back into homes they had escaped from. Besides, there are children who have no home or family to return to. The provinces have child protection laws but no definite policy or plan of action.

The provinces have also made laws to take care of unaccompanied and uncared for street children but proper facilities to look after them are functional only in Punjab. They must realise their obligation under the Convention on the Rights of the Child to recognise the right of every child “to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development” and “to assist parents and others responsible for the child to implement this right”.

Thus, the creation of a task force in Punjab, headed by the advocate-general, to take care of all ‘missing’ or ‘lost’ children will mean no more than establishment of a registration mechanism unless the state accepts responsibility for looking after kids without families and runaway/ street children.

Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2016

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