Streets paved with sexual predators

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By Sidrah Roghay 

Karachi

They jump around on the street like popcorn in a microwave. The open sky, betel stained pavements and busy roads are their home; they eat, sleep and play here. On an average day, you might see some of them inhaling drugs, while others eat titbits from the many restaurants of the city. Some are as young as six or seven, most are runaways, and all of them beg, clean cars and pick pockets for a living.

Though these street children act like a big happy family, there are secrets which they guard from the world, secrets that are too personal and painful. Although they would never accept being sexually abused personally, they open up as soon as they are asked if “a friend” has gone through such an experience.

“The police took away little Kashif, they beat him up, and did ‘ghalat kaam’ with him. Then they left him on the street; he was crying when he came back,” says 15-year-old Salman. “The police, they do bad things to our friends,” claims another child with a blood-stained chin. He fell off a motorcycle.

There are others who talk about being taken away, tied up in chains, beaten up and sexually assaulted. “Ninety percent of street children get sexually abused the first night they spend outside,” says Rana Asif, who heads the Centre for Street Children and has spent over a decade befriending people on the street.

Itfan, head of a programme at the Azad Foundation, an organization which has been working for the betterment of street children since 1998, says the numbers are probably even higher. “A child on a street has an almost 100 percent chance of being sexually abused; they are extremely vulnerable and make easy targets for offenders.”

Researchers agree that abusing a new member — either in the form of unpleasant touching, sexual harassment or forced sex — has become a part of the street culture. After such an ‘initiation’, the child becomes a survivor, and is welcomed into the clique.

A survey titled ‘Silent Shrieks’, organised by the Initiator Human Development Foundation, takes an in-depth look into the plight of the street children in Karachi. It reveals that 26 percent of sexual violence on the street is committed by police officials.

The other main offenders are gang leaders, strangers and drivers. Sexual harassment is the most common form of sexual violence (46 percent), followed by unpleasant touching and forced sex. Salman, a dark skinned boy with bunny teeth, still insists that he has never been sexually abused.

“I live on the street, I am poor but I am ‘izzatdar’. No one can play with my honour, I will fight till the death for it,” he maintains, as his eyes light up with anger and revenge.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-4-88083-Streets-paved-with-sexual-predators

 

Child beaters seek refuge in law

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By Sidrah Roghay

Karachi

Tanveer is eighteen years old, overconfident and an aspiring artist. He has lived on the street for four years, yet he stands out from the rest of the ragged children on Zaibunisa Street as he is fashion conscious. He wears several wrist bands along with a large dialed watch and copies a mélange of Bollywood heroes. The teenager’s language and gestures speak his love for the world of cinema.

He sits at a ‘Dhabba’ which he calls the “best on the street”, orders tea for the group and begins the story of an incident, which even years later, sends shivers down his spine and those of his listeners.

On a street in Saddar, where he had just joined a rehab centre, Tanveer was busy playing cricket with his clique or ‘Chota Group’ when the ball landed on the roof of a house. He rang the bell several times, but when no one opened, he climbed the wall, and reached the roof.

“I was awestruck when I got there. There were at least 300 cricket balls there,” he says as his eyes still shine with amusement. The owner had clearly never returned the balls which landed on that particular rooftop.

In excitement, he called out to his friends and one by one began throwing the balls to them. But his happiness was short lived. “When I reached the fifth ball, Maulvi Sahab, the owner of the house, came out”.

The noise got his attention. He asked Tanveer to come down, took him inside and tied his hands with a thin leather belt. “Then he took off my shirt and whipped me again and again. He called me a thief and an abandoned child.”

Tanveer’s horror did not end here. Maulvi Sahab called up some political workers from Lines Area, who took him to a torture cell where “nine men beat me up in different ways. It was nine men against one tied up child”.

The boy was stripped, hung upside down, then caned and whipped. “They asked me to admit that I am a thief and that a certain person had forced all of us to beg and steal for him.”

“When nothing worked, they loaded a pistol and put it on my head, warning that this was my last chance. It was a spur of the moment thing. I did not want to die, so I admitted everything, even things I had never done.”

Tanveer survived to tell the tale, but his tormentors went unpunished because of several loopholes in Pakistani law. Being a street child, he could not report violence he was subjected to.

The state does not own a child on the street and since his legal guardians are unknown, he can neither register an FIR, nor hire a defence in the court as he does not have a permanent address. As a result, the court cannot summon him.

In other cases less complicated than Tanveer’s where children have been subjected to violence, such as a teacher beating up a student, the perpetrators usually take help from Article 89 of the Pakistan Penal Code. It allows physical punishment of a child under 12 years of age by the “consent expressed or implied by the guardian or other person having lawful charge” of the child, if it is done in “good faith or for the benefit” of the juvenile and the “intention” is not to hurt or cause death.

The idea is to use ‘reasonable’ disciplinary action, but in practice, the definition is somewhat unclear. Moreover the phrase “expressed or implied” is a woolly term, which signifies no written or verbal instruction of a guardian to caregiver.

Rana Asif of the Centre for Street Children claims that by definition, people allowed to hurt a child can begin from parents to uncles, cousins, teachers and caretakers at orphanages. “And it gets worse when Article 89 is used with articles 318 and 319 which talk about Qatl-e-Khata; death by mistake. Its punishment is Diyat or blood money.”

Provincial Manager Juvenile Justice at the Society for the Protection of the Rights of Child (Sparc) Madni Memon claims that every year, there are more than a hundred cases of child violence in Sindh alone. “Most go unreported and even if they are, the perpetrators go unpunished or the case is settled locally because of the loophole in the law.”

The most recent case he remembers occurred in Khairpur, where a fourteen years old boy was beaten up by his teacher “till his right arm broke”. The teacher escaped legal action.

While the society condemns extreme forms of corporal punishments, a survey by the Sparc reveals that 76 percent of parents agree that moderate corporal punishment is necessary to correct a child’s behaviour.

According to a study by the Centre for Street Children, 53 percent children on the street leave home because of physical violence at home, mainly in the form of slapping. Fathers are responsible for such violence in 50% of the cases.

 http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-4-87717-Child-beaters-seek-refuge-in-law