Child trafficking in Pakistan | By Wajahat Ali Malik

Child trafficking in Pakistan

CHILD TRAFFICKING is a form of modern slavery and involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to exploit children for forced labor/services or the sex trade. It is not necessary for a victim of child trafficking to be transported from one location to another for the offense of trafficking to be committed. Travel is not necessary to commit a trafficking offense, although it can occur. Trafficking can take place within a country as well as across international borders. The defining element of trafficking is exploitation for forced labor/services or sex work, not transportation.

Patterns of child trafficking in Pakistan include bonded labour, domestic labour, begging, prostitution, forced marriage, illegal adoption, camel sport, organ transplantation and participation in armed conflict. as soldiers. A significant proportion of child trafficking occurs in the context of migrant smuggling. As cross-border movements of children are not closely monitored, the true extent of child trafficking is not known in Pakistan, although trafficked Pakistani children continue to be detected in other regions of the world.

The Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report is an annual report published since 2001 by the U.S. Department of State's office to monitor the human trafficking situation in each country. The US Department of State's TIP 2022 report reveals that although the government of Pakistan is making significant efforts to eliminate human trafficking, it still does not fully meet the minimum standards to eliminate it. Pakistan's progress in combating human trafficking has been monitored by the US State Department since 2001 and publishes a ranking of Pakistan each year. In previous years, Pakistan remained in the “Tier 2 Watch List”, but due to Pakistan's proactive actions and modernization of its work, its status was changed from “Watch List” to “Country level 2” in 2022. These proactive actions have increased investigations. , prosecutions and convictions in trafficking cases, as well as the provision of protection services to victims of trafficking and the adoption of procedures for referral, assistance and identification of victims and training of stakeholders .

Some of the key findings of the US Department of State's 2022 TIP report on child trafficking in Pakistan are: 1. Traffickers exploited Pakistani girls and boys in sex trafficking in Kenya and Greece respectively. 2. Some traffickers, including organized crime groups, have exploited Pakistani adults and children into forced labor in domestic work, construction and begging in Iran. 3. Some traffickers target Pakistanis with disabilities to force them into begging. 4. Pakistan is a destination country for men, women and children subjected to forced labor, particularly from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. 5. Traffickers exploit women, girls and boys from Afghanistan, Iran and other Asian countries in sex trafficking in Pakistan.

6. Debt bondage is the main form of forced labor, widely practiced in two sectors in Pakistan, namely brick kilns and agriculture, and more than 70 percent of bonded laborers in Pakistan are children. The government did not report any investigations, prosecutions, or convictions under laws abolishing the bonded labor system. Thus, law enforcement efforts against labor trafficking have remained insufficient relative to the scale of the problem. 7. There are 8.5 million domestic workers in Pakistan, many of them children. Traffickers buy, sell, rent, and kidnap children to force them into domestic work and other commercial ventures. 8. The majority of children working on the streets of Pakistan are forced to beg. There are 1.5 million homeless children in Pakistan, a third of them in Sindh province. They are often forced to beg by organized criminal groups. Beggar ringmasters sometimes mutilate children to earn more money and sometimes force children to steal.

9. Children and youth are the most vulnerable victims of sex trafficking in Pakistan. Traffickers exploit boys in sex trafficking around hotels, truck stops, bus stations and sanctuaries. The Covid-19 pandemic has made children more vulnerable to sex trafficking. In previous years, widespread sexual exploitation of boys in a mining community in Balochistan was reported. Boys as young as 6 years old from Balochistan, KP and Afghanistan are allegedly lured to work in mines but subjected to sex trafficking. In some cases, parents are complicit in sending their children to the mines for sex trafficking. Some employers, particularly in restaurants and factories, require child workers to provide sexual favors to obtain employment with the employer, to maintain their employment, and/or for housing. Some police officers accept bribes to ignore prostitution-related crimes, and some officers may have refused to record cases of child sexual exploitation, including sex trafficking, without a bribe. Traffickers promised Pakistani boys admission to Afghan religious schools but sold them to members of the Afghan security forces for Bacha Bazi, a practice in which men exploit boys for social and sexual entertainment .

10. Some Pakistani traffickers lure girls and women, abduct them from their families with promises of marriage, create fraudulent marriage certificates, and exploit girls and women in sex trafficking, particularly in Iran and Afghanistan. Traffickers target poor Christian communities to send women and girls to China for arranged marriages. Upon arrival in China, hundreds of Pakistani girls said their husbands forced them into the sex trade. In other cases, traffickers, including some extrajudicial courts, use girls as property to settle debts or disputes. Some traffickers force their victims to use drugs and exploit their addiction to keep them in sex trafficking.

11. Non-state militant groups have kidnapped children as young as 12 years old, purchased them from impoverished parents, coerced parents with threats or made fraudulent promises of a bright future to their children or recruited children of Madaris and forced them to act as spies, fight and carry out suicide attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is clear from the above findings that child trafficking is a widespread problem in Pakistan and the government should take appropriate steps to determine the root causes and eradicate it completely.

—The author is a former Program Policy Advisor at the National Commission for Child Rights, Government of Pakistan, Islamabad.

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