Pakistan - Child Protection Problems

It is not the least bit surprising that the National Child Protection Policy, despite being enacted as law through the Child Protection Protection System Bill 2014, still lies unimplemented.

An estimated 2.5 million children (the actual number could be much higher) are currently part of the country’s workforce, which goes against the country’s own laws, not counting that it is also against various international conventions on human rights signed by Pakistan.

Children as young as six enter the workforce as undocumented labour, and are doomed to stay there for the rest of their lives. Education, an unalienable right of children everywhere, is denied to a big portion of Pakistan’s adolescent population, which means that the principle of equal opportunity in the job market is an unachievable dream for many.

And although many children working will tell you that this is through their own preference, the internationally established age of maturity is centred on certain principles.

In the case of Pakistan, the age of 18, when one gets their National Identity Card made, is when a child is seen to have grown up enough to make their own decisions. Any point before that, their parents and guardians are supposed to make choices with the child’s best interests at heart. In Pakistani society, not only are parents not always looking to protect their children, but there is also the concept of letting a child believe that they have grown up and can think for themselves long before that is actually the case.

The sad fact is that Tayyaba – the girl that employed by Sessions Judge Raja Khurram’s household – is one case out of countless others where children employed in various fields have been abused at the hands of their employers. The law against employing children has acted more as an impediment than anything else, considering the government has not tried stopping children becoming a part of the workforce.

What this means is that many are driven to work at an early age, and do not even have the legal cover that an adult member of the workforce is to have, which would ideally be concerned with protecting workers’ rights and would protect them from harm due to their employment.

The world sees children as equal to adults in terms of granting rights and liberties, but special conventions include extra protection and care for them alongside these rights for obvious reasons. The Pakistani state is denying its children both, and must rectify this immediately.