LAHORE: After introducing reading material for parents and teachers on how to keep children out of harm’s way, Punjab has prepared a booklet to impart ‘sex education’ to children in the wake of Zainab’s rape-murder in Kasur.

The “Secure Children Strong Pakistan” booklet will be distributed among children up to 10 years of age through their respective schools shortly. The eight-page document not only contains training material for children but also identifies responsibilities of teachers and parents for protecting the children.

Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah Khan says the level of understanding of children has been kept in mind while finalising the material for the booklet.

Clerics belonging to the state-supervised Muttahida Ulema Board have also been taken on board before making public the reading material aimed at educating children about how to protect themselves from paedophiles, he told media here on Friday.

The law minister said the administrations of all public and private schools had been directed to make reading of the booklet compulsory during morning assembly so that all the children would learn it by heart. Besides, he said, the schools would impart self-defence techniques to the students.

He said work on an alert system on the pattern of Amber Alert was also in progress. The Talash (search) Alert would be issued to the mass media and law enforcers as soon as a child goes missing and would be repeated until the missing child was found, Mr Sanaullah said.

He told a questioner that the booklet would be amended from time to time while a proposal to make the reading material part of examinations and assign marks to it keeping in view its importance was also under consideration.

Auqaf Minister Zaeem Qadri told the media men that the booklets would be distributed at 53,000 mosques in the province and khateebs would be requested to make child protection a topic of their Friday sermons.

He said the government also planned to observe Feb 7 as Child Protection Day every year for creating awareness among people about the importance of the issue.

School Education Secretary Allah Bakhsh, however, says reading material for students of primary, middle and high school levels has been prepared separately and sent to the chief executive officers across the province with the direction that it should be forwarded to school heads for use during morning assembly and parent-teacher meeting to sensitise the stakeholders on the sensitive issue in an appropriate manner.

Published in Dawn, February 3rd, 2018