Three-year-old's body found in Mardan

A minor girl's badly mutilated body was recovered from a mountain in the Mardan district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

The girl's father, Y*, is a stenographer in a local civil court in Karachi, while the victim was spending her summer vacations at her grandmother's home along with her mother and three sisters. The three-year-old girl went missing while playing outside her house around four days ago.

Police registered a report of her disappearance on the complaint of her uncle, Shakirullah.

Mardan DPO Zahoor Babar Afridi took notice of the mysterious disappearance of the girl and formed a special team comprising DSP Takhtbhai Circle Shakeel Khan, DSP Shergarh Circle Ajab Khan, and SHO Kharki police station Shaukat Khan to search for her.

As per a report by nongovernmental organisation Sahil, 11 children were abused every day in 2023, with mostly acquaintances and relatives involved in the heinous act. These statistics were reported in the Cruel Numbers 2023 report of the organisation. The findings were made public on 29 Feb 2024 with the support of the National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR).

The report said that in 2023, a total number of 4,213 child abuse cases had been reported from all four provinces, Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB). These included reported cases of child sexual abuse, abduction, missing children, and child marriages.

A gender-divide analysis of the data showed that out of the total reported cases, 2,251 (53 per cent) of victims were girls and 1,962 (47 per cent) were boys. The report showed that children most vulnerable to abuse lay in the age group of 6-15 years, in which more cases of boys were reported than girls.

Moreover, children as young as 0-5 years were also sexually abused. The abusers' category of Cruel Numbers 2023 indicated that acquaintances were still the most involved in child sexual abuse, along with relatives, family members, strangers and women abettors.

The geographical divide statistics show that out of the total 4,213 reported cases, 75 per cent were reported from Punjab, 13 per cent cases from Sindh, seven per cent from Islamabad Capital Territory, three per cent cases from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and two per cent from Balochistan, Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB).

The report showed that out of the total reported cases, 91 per cent had been registered with the police, and this was seen as a positive sign, indicating an active role` of law enforcement in addressing the issue. In 2,021 cases, children from both genders were sexually abused, whereas 61 of them were murdered after sexual abuse and at least 1,833 cases pertained to abduction.