IN Pakistan, the case of Tayabba, a 10-year-old maid allegedly beaten and tortured by her employers, a judge and his wife in Islamabad, serves as an ugly reminder that the myriad of programmes and campaigns for girls’ education, awareness and empowerment, aren’t making much of a dent in changing negative attitudes towards girls and young women in our society.

Perhaps that’s because we aren’t addressing a basic paradox: that Pakistan’s girls are not just socially shortchanged but are also vigorously economically exploited in all strata of society. In 2012, 12.5 million Pakistani children were involved in child labour, according to the ILO. No official study on child labour has been conducted by Pakistan since 1996, so no figures exist to examine the huge economy of girl-child labour in Pakistan. Yet it’s precisely this economy that we have to short-circuit before any meaningful change will take place for Pakistan’s girls.

Some development programmes in Pakistan try to offset the economic losses parents face when choosing to send their daughters to school instead of putting them to work. Nutritional interventions feed girls in school, such as the Tawana Pakistan project; others provide a small stipend, as in the Girls Stipend Programme in KP. But these projects are largely symbolic and financially nugatory. They do not compensate for the monetary worth a girl can provide her family through more profitable but illegal means.

The belief that girls are inferior and unwanted when compared to boys mixes toxically with the pressing urgency to feed hungry families. Girls are told they’re disposable throwaways but in reality they are commodities with material value. Their uselessness impressed upon them from birth, they are put to use as cheap labour in their own families: assisting their mothers as household drudges and child-minders, or working on a farm and rearing cattle. Or, they’re employed in the cities, as Tayabba was, or in factories, or on the streets, where they are begging or sexually exploited.

In reality they are commodities with material value.

Tayabba was sold to an agent for Rs18,000; she worked for two years in the house of a serving judicial official in Pakistan’s District and Sessions local courts, Raja Khurram Ali Khan, and his wife. She first said she got her injuries — gruesome bruises, a swollen eye, and burnt hands — from falling down the stairs. When the couple were finally arrested and brought to trial, Tayabba confessed that she was beaten and the judge’s wife held her hands to a cooker, after a broom went missing in the judge’s house.

Tayabba’s father showed up at the court and publicly forgave the Khans, assisted by a lawyer who was related to Raja Ali Khan. The judge and his wife were released on bail, whereupon Tayabba and her father disappeared. The Supreme Court ordered the police to find Tayabba, overturned the ‘pardon’ of the Islamabad court, suspended Raja Ali Khan and are re-hearing the case right now.

For decades Pakistanis harboured the misapprehension that raising a girl and keeping her ‘at home’ afforded some protection against the dangers of the street and the outside world. Decades of poverty and deprivation shows us that gender is no protection at all. Pakistan’s girls are blamed for their own existence, then exploited to make money for a chain of people — parents and relatives, husbands and in-laws, employers and purchasers.

The origins of this cycle begin in the very place where a girl’s life begins, with their mothers who are little better than child factories. Dr Anokhi Khanum, who worked with Médecins Sans Frontières in 2016 to help women and children in KP and the tribal areas, observed mothers’ bodies worn out by multiple childbirths — eight, nine, 10, not including stillbirths or miscarriages. An unusual number of twins and triplets are being born in hospitals in Peshawar because women take high amounts of fertility drugs timed with the visits of their husbands working as labourers in the Gulf.

Later, Pakistan’s girls become brides in marriage transactions, often to older men, even though their own bodies are barely ready for the task. In each instance, there is a financial transaction behind the activity: either a sum of money exchanged, or another girl in exchange for the first amongst families in a complicated tangle that holds kin and communities together. There is no price for the most valuable function of all: giving birth to the next generation. And so the cycle continues.

For every Tayabba rescued, there are millions more of Pakistan’s girls labouring away in fear, hunger and solitude. Until we decouple their lives from the unmeasured economic gains that their virtual imprisonment provides, they will continue to live as marginalised slaves in millions of households, their own, and others’. We have to drive the economy of girls as it exists in all its forms in Pakistan out of business.

The writer is an author.

Twitter: @binashah

Published in Dawn, May 9th, 2017