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IN a 2021 documentary by Al Jazeera about his daughter’s death, Zainab’s father Amin Ansari says he wants to make Kasur a safe place so that no parent has to endure what he did. In 2018, his seven-year-old daughter went missing from her home in Kasur. Her body was found in the trash five days later. Her murderer, Imran, was caught and charged with the rape and murder of her and seven other children. Amin points to the cameras in the alleys to show how Kasur will become a safe city where children will once again feel safe while playing outside.
The cameras haven’t made Kasur, or any other city in the country, safe. But, they did capture a recent assault on a young girl, which led to the nabbing of the perpetrator. As seems to be the norm, first the video went viral on social media. We see a girl riding a bicycle in a neighbourhood alley when a man walks towards her. Like a horror film, you know something terrible is going to happen to her; he leans over to grab and molest her. He runs off but you watch her wipe her mouth before running home, ostensibly. It makes you want to rip your heart out.
On the day I sat down to write about the epidemic of sexual violence in our country, a friend sent me another video, also of an assault on a young girl walking (presumably) in her neighbourhood with a younger child before a man assaults her. He flees as a boy on a bicycle pulls up to seemingly ask what happened. She stops her conversation with him to console the wailing little boy. That really broke my heart — this girl can barely deal with the shock of the attack; she must comfort the child traumatised by what he saw.
The video released on social media about the first assault led to the man being caught. I don’t know what happened in the second case, yet. But in the first, the police said there was a shoot-out in which the accused shot himself. No one on social media believes that. Most believe the police shot him and regret that he wasn’t killed on the spot. I would not have been surprised if I’d heard he was lynched by a crowd, what with vigilante justice a norm. This can’t be allowed to happen, no matter what you think of paedophiles and rapists.
A few months ago, this paper reported data from Sahil showing at least 3,364 child abuse cases in the country last year. I suspect there are so many more that go unreported due to shame or a lack of faith in the police or justice system.
Zainab’s case was unique in that Imran was hanged in October, 10 months after her body was found. Her father was present at the hanging he tells Al Jazeera; Imran did not seek forgiveness or express remorse. Amin spearheaded a campaign about sexual violence against children that resulted in a child protection bill in his daughter’s name. The Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery law promises to ensure quicker police response to sexual abuse charges, stricter punishment and a database of missing children.
But laws are futile if they are not enacted and they alone cannot address the epidemic. We also cannot be reliant on videos becoming viral on social media. We don’t know about other assaults that took place in Kasur or elsewhere that day. I also fear a desensitisation to such images, especially among the youth who will think violence is normal. It is not. Yet heightened violence on TV shows, games, even mainstream media, has normalised brutality. Tech Bros work hard to prioritise such violent content on their platforms through sophisticated algorithms. Their goal is to have passive participants aimlessly scrolling for hours on end, unmoved by the gory images they see. Research by Harvard says repeated exposure to such images “blunts emotional responses, fostering a diminished sense of empathy towards real-world atrocities”.
Then there’s attitudes to sexual violence. From a prime minister to a police officer to a religious scholar to a playwright, the question is ‘what was she doing outside’?
Instead of attacking the victim, we must redirect our anger at the people who say such vile, irresponsible things. There should be no whataboutery around sexual violence. Period.
In the Al Jazeera documentary, we also meet another young girl and her parents. She was found barely alive in a rubbish heap after Imran raped her and dumped her body thinking she’d died. We watch as her mother feeds a disabled daughter through a feeding tube. “I hoped my daughter would be the last,” says her father as his eyes well up. How many more girls will we let down?
The writer is an instructor of journalism.
Published in Dawn, August 3rd, 2025
