By Adnan Rafique
ISLAMABAD: The Sustainable Social Development Organization (SSDO) is set to release a comprehensive report on Monday, on cases of child sexual abuse in Pakistan, covering data from 2019 to 2023.
The report is based on information gathered from all districts across the country, compiled using official data obtained under Right of Access to Information laws. It provides district-level details of child sexual abuse cases across all provinces and districts of Pakistan. SSDO’s Executive Director, Syed Kausar Abbas emphasized that this report is a significant step toward highlighting the severity of child sexual abuse in Pakistan. He further added that SSDO collected the data using Right of Access to Information laws to help and design more effective strategies for child protection.
Earlier this year, In a shocking revelation, around 1,630 cases of child abuse were reported nationwide between January and June 2024, according to the NGO Sahil’s report titled Six Months Cruel Numbers. This data includes 862 cases of child sexual abuse, 668 cases of abduction, 82 cases of missing children, and 18 cases of child marriages. The report, based on cases reported in newspapers across all four provinces, as well as Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), reveals that 59 percent of the victims (962) were girls, while 41 percent (668) were boys.
Geographically, 78 percent of the cases were reported from Punjab, 11 percent from Sindh, 6 percent from ICT, 3 percent from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and 2 percent from Balochistan, AJK, and GB. Notably, 44 percent of the reported cases were from urban areas, while 56 percent were from rural areas. In an interview with Voicepk, Imtiaz Ahmed Soomro, a lawyer associated with the Sahil Foundation, said that before the Zainab murder case, there was no established child abuse law in Pakistan. However, even with the new law in place, its implementation remains non-existent. Victims often reach compromises with the accused due to social, political, and economic pressures.
