The children we sacrifice

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Pakistani children aren't safe. That's not opinion or exaggeration. It's the bleak, burning truth we keep looking away from. They're ignored, exploited, brutalised and abandoned on every possible front.

But don't think for a second the numbers in this piece tell the whole story. For every reported case, dozens vanish into silence or into the child's grave.

The first blow comes from malnutrition. One in every two children under five is malnourished. That means emaciated bodies, arrested growth and immune systems too weak to fight off pneumonia and measles — diseases that have no business killing kids in the 21st century.

While malnutrition cripples the body, neglect chains the mind. An estimated 26 million children between the ages of 5 and 16 are out of school. That's not a gap. That's a canyon. And it's swallowing their futures whole.

Even worse than having no future is having no safety. No shield from the horrors that come next.

In 2024 alone, 1828 cases of child sexual abuse - including toddlers aged 0-5 — were reported. Fifty-six children were murdered after being raped. Recently in Muzaffargarh, a boy was raped and filmed by a man his family once relied on for income. Just weeks earlier, FIA busted an international child pornography ring in the same district. You'd think that would prompt tighter surveillance and stricter enforcement, but that hope was dead on arrival.

At least 241 children went missing last year; 1204 were abducted. Many never return. Some are swallowed up by trafficking networks. Five people - including two female doctors — were caught in June smuggling a nine-month-old from Karachi to Mozambique. Some are sold for illegal adoption. Some end up shackled in forced labour or pushed into begging rings. Others, chillingly, for their organs or purposes too grim to detail.

Not all cages have locks. Some look like classrooms. Some like madrassas. And in them, children are beaten into submission or graves. In May, a fifth-grader in Jamrud tehsil of K-P was bludgeoned on the head, neck and back during assembly. He died from his injuries. The ban on corporal punishment is just ink on paper.

But it doesn't stop at schools and madrassas. There's no refuge from violence at home either. A man in my neighborhood earlier this year beat his five-year-old daughter so badly her face swelled beyond recognition; her right eye deep blue, the white streaked with red.

Many don't even make it that far. Drugs devour them before life even begins. School or street, kids as young as 13 are smoking. I've seen many puffing on cigarettes like men three times their age, already hardened beyond their years. That's just what we see. Imagine what we don't.

Drugs take many. Labour takes more. At least 10 million children in Pakistan are engaged in labour: scrubbing dishes, selling goods, cleaning windshields, hauling bricks, polishing shoes — childhood bartered for a few hundred rupees. Is that all a child's life is worth to us?

And then there's child marriage. Forty-five cases were reported in 2024. But there could easily be 45 a day in every corner of this country, under every excuse imaginable. Girls are pulled out of school and thrust headfirst into adult burdens, adult trauma and sometimes adult graves.

Every number above screams for help, yet politics, power plays and public indifference drown them out. We treat our children like they're disposable. We mourn them in speeches, show up at funerals for photo ops, hush their families with hush money, but fail them in life.

We're drowning in surveys, ideas, policies and taskforces, but starved of the will to act, to protect, to punish and to prioritise.

We must stop filing these stories away as one-off horror tales. They're not. They're part of a system built on apathy, exploitation, violence and betrayal.

Unless there's collective outrage — not performative hashtags, but real pressure on the state to protect its most vulnerable — this will keep going.

This is a full-blown war on children. And we're losing it!