Two particularly distressing cases involving the murders of young children have taken place in Karachi, and in the space of less than a month. Both cases are shocking and are not the usual case of street crime gone wrong, which at times ends in the killing of a citizen who resisted the mugging, or even a target killing, which Karachi has seen quite a lot of. Both relate to a broken home – where the father and mother are not living together –, in both cases they had become divorced, and there were also custody issues. In both cases, the parents were fighting over the custody of the young children; additionally, in both cases, the children were under the age of ten, and there was a sister and a brother in each family.
The first such case happened right at the beginning of August when police reported a man in his forties to have jumped into the sea near Karachi’s Seaview beach, and his two children, both under the age of ten, were with him. Over the next 24 hours, the man’s body and those of his daughter and son were eventually found a couple of kilometres towards Karachi’s port area. Further investigation by the police revealed that the man had recently lost custody of the two children to his ex-wife. The court had directed that the children could meet him at specific times and under supervision. The children had lunch with their father during one such supervised meeting, after which he took them to the beach and then jumped in, taking his children to their deaths along with his own.
It doesn’t take an expert to figure out that the custody issue had deeply impacted the father. Police had also said that he was an addict, and this would mean that in such a state, he was not thinking clearly. The case of the murder of the children by the father died with the latter, and the matter will stand closed, as far as the police investigation is concerned.
We also need to have proactive and rigorous legislation in Pakistan to safeguard the lives of our children from any individual who may harm them, even if it is their close relatives
Following this tragedy, a couple of weeks later, a woman who was living on her own after a divorce from her husband and following the grant of the children’s custody to their father, killed her daughter and son. The case happened in an affluent area of Karachi and the son who was murdered by the mother is said to have been a student at one of the city’s top schools. The sad story here is similar to the first case – a broken home, parents divorcing, and a custody battle. One difference is that the mother is believed to suffer from serious mental health issues, and police say that may be one reason why she murdered her children. Police say that after killing her son and daughter in her own home, when the children were visiting her, she messaged her former husband and told him that she had killed them – and that he was to blame for all that had happened.
One could say that both tragic cases are the kind one usually reads or hears of happening in the West, in Europe or North America, where the family has been breaking apart for many years, and where mental health issues seem more prevalent than in the developing world. Or it could be that such things have always happened here – marriages falling apart, leaving children vulnerable and usually suffering the most – but now the media is reporting them more. Besides, with the advent and wide use of social media combined with the rapid spread of smartphones, news of such cases spreads literally like wildfire.
Of course, living in the society that we do, completely preventing such tragedies can be difficult, if not next to impossible. But what we can do is sensitise people to the fact that a significant proportion of the population suffers from serious mental health issues, and that leaving young children in their care without any kind of supervision may not be such a good idea. Developed countries are far ahead in this regard, and they do realise that even a parent who suffers from serious mental health challenges may not be able to take good care of his or her child and may pose a threat to their wellbeing.
While advocating greater awareness of mental health issues and their impact on people’s lives and actions, we also need to have proactive and rigorous legislation in Pakistan to safeguard the lives of our children from any individual who may harm them, even if it is their close relatives. This also means setting up a comprehensive framework under which such threats can be regularly monitored and action taken, even against parents, to safeguard the lives of their children.