There is a category of capital offence in this country reserved almost exclusively for children. You will not find it written in the Penal Code, but the case law is extensive. It includes letting a pet parrot out of its cage. It includes being suspected of taking food from a kitchen. It includes a missing piece of jewellery, a broken vase, a chore done too slowly. The accused are eight, ten, twelve years old. The sentence, carried out privately and without appeal, is death by beating, and it is handed down by respectable people in comfortable houses who will, in almost every case, walk free.
Last month, it was a twelve-year-old girl in Lahore's Gulberg, tortured to death in the home where she worked. A murder case was registered. As I write, no arrest of any real consequence has been announced, and the familiar machinery of official sorrow has begun to turn. A bureau has taken notice. A chairperson has released a statement about how violence against children will not be tolerated. A minister, somewhere, has expressed deep grief and ordered a full investigation. We have performed all of this before, many times, with the very same words, and it has never once kept a child alive. Let me say some of their names, because the apparatus of concern is remarkably good at forgetting them.
There was Zohra, seven years old, in Rawalpindi, beaten to death after a pet parrot escaped its cage. There was Uzma Bibi, sixteen years old, whose body was pulled from a canal in Lahore after blows to the head, and who had earned Rs4,000 a month. There was Iqra, who had been working since the age of eight to pay down her father's debt, and who was found with multiple fractures. There was Kinza, eleven years old, tortured in the home of a doctor. There was a child in Faisalabad whose killers explained the marks on her body as the result of allergies. And there was Tayyaba, ten years old, whose employer happened to be a sessions judge, and whose case became a small masterclass in how the powerful arrange these matters, for it emerged that two district judges and a lawyer had worked, with impressive speed, to clear the judge and his wife. The penalty for pledging the labour of a child had, for years, stood at around Rs250. Less than the cost of a pizza in the sort of neighbourhood where these children die.
None of this is a run of isolated tragedies, whatever the ministers say. It is a system, and it has a structure. There are, by the International Labour Organisation's count, some 8.5 million domestic workers in Pakistan, a great many of them children, which is a striking figure in a country where it is illegal to employ anyone under fifteen in the first place. The law exists. It is simply understood by everyone, on both sides of the transaction, to be decorative. A poor family, often in rural Sindh or southern Punjab, takes an advance against a child's future wages. The child is sent, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, into a stranger's house to work off a debt she did not incur and cannot count. She is eight. She has no contract, no union, no inspector who will ever knock on that door, and no way home. She is, in the most literal sense, pledged.
And the pledging turns lethal often enough to have been counted. In 2020 three rights organisations, going only by the cases that had surfaced in the newspapers, found more than 140 child domestic workers abused, tortured, raped or killed across the preceding decade. Of those, 44 had been murdered. Because these were merely the cases the press happened to notice, everyone who assembled the figure agreed it was an undercount, a floor beneath which no one could see. Nearly 79 percent of the incidents came out of Punjab, though no province is clean; the practice is national, and so is the impunity that follows it.
Because our law permits the killing of a human being to be forgiven privately, for cash, through the institution of diyat, the case simply dissolves.
And when one of these children dies, the machinery that failed to protect her turns smoothly to the work of protecting the people who killed her. The first move is denial. The marks were allergies. She fell. She was always sickly. The second move, once denial fails, is money. The employers are people of means; the parents are people of none, grief-stricken, and far from home. An offer is made. A settlement is reached. Because our law permits the killing of a human being to be forgiven privately, for cash, through the institution of diyat, the case simply dissolves. The file, which was never going to reach a courtroom, closes. The employers go back to their comfortable house and, within a season, engage another child, because the supply, God help us, is endless.
After each of these deaths there is, reliably, a law. A province announces fresh regulations for domestic workers. A bill is tabled. A committee convenes. Punjab set rules for the employment of domestic workers years ago; Sindh, in its own fashion, did the same. The rules exist in precisely the way the age limit exists, which is to say on paper, admired from a distance, enforced against no one. Legislation in this country is frequently a form of mourning. We do not pass a law to change what happens next. We pass it to demonstrate that we felt something about what just happened.
It is worth noticing who does the noticing. In case after case, the death was reported to the police not by any organ of the state but by the staff of the hospital where the child was finally, far too late, brought in. The doctors saw the fractures and the burns and the marks of a beating, and picked up the telephone. The whole protective apparatus of the state, the bureaus and the acts and the chairpersons, had failed to register that a child was being tortured in a well-known neighbourhood until a casualty doctor filed a report over a body. Our system does not prevent these deaths. It learns of them, when it learns of them at all, from morgues.
What shields the killers, in the end, is respectability. These are not crimes committed in the dark by strangers. They are committed in Gulberg and Bahria Town and Defence, by doctors and judges and businessmen and their wives, the sort of people who are believed when they say a child fell down the stairs. The victim earns Rs4,000 a month while she is alive, and is worth, once dead, whatever sum can be pressed upon her illiterate parents in a quiet room. The gap between those two figures, and the ease with which the second is paid, is the entire moral economy of the thing. A poor child is cheap to employ, cheap to bury, and cheapest of all to forget.
It is worth looking, for a moment, at a place that decided to treat such a death differently. In Singapore, a domestic worker named Piang Ngaih Don, a young woman from Myanmar, was starved and beaten to death by her employer over many months in 2016. The state there did not reach for a settlement. It prosecuted. The employer was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The employer's mother, who had joined in the abuse, was given 17. And the employer's husband, a serving police officer who had quietly dismantled the home's own cameras to bury the evidence, was himself jailed for 10 years. Sit with that final detail against our own arrangements, in which the policeman is so often the man who helps the file vanish rather than the man who goes to prison for trying to make it vanish. The difference between the two countries is not that one breeds cruel employers and the other does not. Every society produces them. The difference is that one of the two decided the life of a servant was worth the trouble of a trial.
So the bureau will visit the family of the twelve-year-old in Gulberg. It will assure them of full legal support, as it assured the others. A hashtag will trend for a few days. A talk show will give it a segment, with grave music beneath the anchor's voice. And then the attention will move on, as it always does, and the case will proceed at the speed these cases proceed, which is to say backwards, until it settles into the familiar quiet of an unpunished death.
We are told, each time, that this must never be allowed to happen again. It will happen again. It will very likely happen before this column is a month old, to another child whose name we will learn for a week and then mislay. We have built, at considerable expense, an elaborate machinery of official grief: the notice, the statement, the ordered inquiry, the solemn promise. What we have never quite got around to building is the far simpler thing that might have saved her, which is a country willing to treat the life of a poor child as worth more than the price of keeping quiet about her death.