A curious case

The girls recovered by the police from a house in Karachi were seemingly being used as a form of currency


Editorial November 27, 2014

It was being reported on the afternoon of November 27 that seven of the 33 girl-children recovered by the police from a house in Liaquatabad, Karachi, had been reunited with their parents — and in concrete terms that is almost as much as is known with any certainty about this curious case. The search for the families of the other 26 girls is still underway and the children remain in the care of the police. It is alleged that the parents of eight of the girls are in Karachi but have failed to get in touch with the authorities for reasons best known to themselves, and the children remain bewildered and confused. They all speak Pashto and appear to all originate from Bajaur agency.



The circumstances by which they came to be together as a group are opaque, but it is alleged that they were brought to an unregistered seminary in order to settle a debt. The madrassa had been run like a boarding school, and the owner appears to have taken the children to the home of another woman in settlement of a monetary debt. The woman was to care for the children and pay off her debt in this way. The children are aged between six and 12 and how they came to be in this unusual situation — effectively used as collateral — has not been independently verified. The woman who placed them in their new ‘home’ they knew only as ‘Baji’ and she has disappeared. The children know next to nothing themselves — including the name of the seminary from which they were uprooted or the real name of the woman who in effect traded them. There appears to be no precedent, no other similar case having been previously reported, and no effective child-protection apparatus at the disposal of provincial officials to support the children. It is not unusual for poor parents to place their children in madrassas, but it is unusual to find a large group of girls thus placed, and possibly unique to find them used as instruments of debt-cancellation. It is too soon to say that the girls were trafficked in a conventional sense, but they were seemingly being used as a form of currency — though what the nature of any offence might be is also unclear. Urgent questions must be asked and answered.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 28th, 2014.

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COMMENTS (1)

Stranger | 9 years ago | Reply

Hmmm they all seem to be wearing some kind of a uniform .Do they have uniforms in madarasas ?

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