The missing children of Karachi — how the state is failing its most vulnerable

Chaos reigned at the Pervez household on the morning of January 7. It was the first day of school after the winter holidays and his three sons, Aariz, Sarim and Azfar, sure were a handful. The commotion would normally last till 10pm when the boys would forcefully be sent to bed.

That day, however, the home had fallen uncharacteristically silent by sunset. Five-year-old Sarim, the middle child, had been missing since 3:40pm. He had gone to a nearby madrassah with his brother, which Mohsin Pervez said was located at a four-minute walk. He never came home.

Aariz and Sarim had a habit of racing home from the madrassah every day. Sarim, being the smarter one both in class and outside, always took the shorter route home and won, Pervez recalled. “He lost that day.”

Even before the police were called and an official search began, Sarim’s father knew his son hadn’t gotten lost or run away. “He was a responsible kid, and he knew the neighbourhood well because he would get daily essentials for his mother on days I came home late. We had even made him memorise our address,” he said.

The family feared he was in danger. “The police promised they would find him,” Pervez recalled. “We were hopeful.”

For the next week, all of Sarim’s belongings sat in their original place at their home in New Karachi; a packed school bag, a neat bed and a cabinet stacked with his favourite brand of macaroni — the one he had asked his mother to cook the day he went missing. But with each passing day, the hope of Sarim returning home waned further.

A picture of Sarim’s textbooks provided by his parents. PHOTO: DAWN

In the last two months alone, 56 children, all between the ages of zero and 18, were kidnapped or went missing across Karachi. The highest number of abductions were reported in District East, police data shows. Of these, 22 remain missing.

The figures follow a similar pattern from last year, when around 400 children were kidnapped or reported missing in the port city.

The FIR fiasco

Pervez remembers Jan 7 as if it were yesterday. He had dropped his boys home from school at around 12:30pm and then left for work. About four hours later, his panicked sister called to inform him about Sarim. He rushed home to find the entire neighbourhood in disarray.

He combed the neighbourhood frantically — the nearby playground, the neighbour’s house, the madrassah. The father called out for an hour but didn’t hear back. Tired and out of breath, Pervez sat on the stairs of the mosque adjoining the madrassah where Sarim went. There, he noticed a pair of black gloves, the same he had made his son wear that morning.

That is when he decided to go to the nearby Bilal Colony Police Station. “But upon reaching there, we were told to get an application ‘on typing’ — a printout,” he told Dawn.com.

“It took me an hour to get it after which I returned to the police station with the application and Sarim’s photographs. They told me that the complaint would be forwarded to the station house officer and the investigating officer,” Pervez said, adding that he subsequently returned home.

But he didn’t see or hear back from the police for the next several hours. “So I went to the police station again and found they had forgotten about the application I submitted.”

Finally, at 12:05am, over nine hours after Sarim had gone missing, a first information report (FIR) was registered. Pervez returned home, pulled a chair, sat at the entrance of his block and waited.

GRAPHICS: DAWN

The police, on the other hand, had a different version of events. Central Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Zeeshan Shafiq Siddiqi told Dawn.com that the FIR was registered immediately after the complaint was submitted. “After that, we visited the area ourselves and collected all the evidence.”

Siddiqi added that the police also searched all the flats in the area the next day.

According to child protection lawyers, the period between when a child goes missing and the registration of the FIR plays a crucial role in their recovery. “As noted in international studies, the psychology of an abuser is such that they are cowards and will likely let the child go if the police make it to their street. But the more the delay in the response, the more vulnerable the child gets,” said Miqdad Mehdi, a high court advocate, who previously served as the national coordinator of the Working Group against Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitations.

But when parents visit a police station, he continued, they face problems. “If a boy is missing, they are told to wait for him to come back. And if it’s a girl, a teenager or relatively older, it is assumed that she has eloped which becomes embarrassing for the family.”

“Ajayega bacha (the child will come back)” and “Ye ink ghar ka maamla hay (this is their personal matter)” are some sentences often heard from the police in such cases despite the law saying otherwise.

Mehdi pointed out that under the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Act (ZARRA) 2020 — aimed at raising alarm and aiding in the response and recovery of missing or abducted children — police are bound to register an FIR within two hours of a child being reported missing by their parents. But while the law is enforced across Pakistan, its implementation is lacking because rules under it are yet to be framed — operational requirements such as networking with all national and provincial stakeholders etc.

“When you go to the police and they delay the response, they don’t even know about the repercussions for not adhering to the law,” he lamented.

The investigation and the investigators

For the next four days after the registration of the FIR, Sarim’s father didn’t hear anything from the police except for an occasional visit to the area once a day. During this time, the family put up posters — Sarim in a blue shirt, his eyes twinkling, nose pudgy and hair dishevelled — on social media seeking any information about the missing child.

“It was then that I started getting extortion and ransom calls,” Pervez said. “These people claimed to have seen Sarim and demanded money in exchange for information. But when we probed them with questions regarding his appearance, none had any answer.”

According to his father, the day he went missing, Sarim was wearing a sky-blue shirt, brown pants, and red and blue striped sneakers.

Following the ransom calls, the case was transferred from the Bilal Colony Police Station to the Anti-Violence Crime Cell (AVCC) — a specialised police unit addressing violent crimes such as murder and extortion in Karachi. According to SSP Central, kidnapping for ransom falls under the mandate of the AVCC.

“We were satisfied with the transfer,” said Pervez. They began the investigation afresh. Dawn.com reached out to the AVCC to understand the investigation mechanism of child kidnapping cases but they didn’t respond to our queries.

However, Mohammad Farooq, cofounder of the Zainab Alert application — developed to facilitate the rapid reporting and recovery of missing or abducted children in Pakistan — explained that 99.9 per cent of such cases were reported to the app because it worked in tandem with the Citizens Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), child protection bureau and other agencies.

“When a case comes to us, the first step is to guide the parents to reach out to the police and get an FIR registered,” he said. “We alert the police ourselves as well.”

The next step was to dig deeper; find out the age of the child, check if there is a custody issue, and guide parents to check water tanks, open manholes, shelter homes and hospitals. Once the case was verified, an alert was issued for law enforcement agencies, child protection bureaus and non-profit organisations such as the Edhi Foundation.

At this point though, social media was not involved. “Before that, we vet the case thoroughly to ensure that it does not pertain to kidnapping for ransom because if the information is released beforehand, it could endanger the child,” Farooq explained.

From then onwards, the team actively worked on the case along with the police which also included visiting the parents and alerting CPLC offices across the province. As and if the severity of the case increased, further departments were engaged as was done in Sarim’s case.

Valerie Khan Yousafzai, a child protection expert and development practitioner working on human rights, called the work done by the CPLC and Zainab Alert app the “best in Pakistan” but at the same time pointed out that there was a lack of coordination at a multi-sectoral, intra-provincial and inter-provincial level.

That, combined with a lack of effective rule of law and implementation, particularly those regarding child protection, was affecting the efficiency of timely and adequate response needed in such cases, she added.

On Jan 18, exactly 11 days after he went missing, at about 10:30am, Sarim’s body was found floating in an underground water tank in his apartment complex. On the day the five-year-old went missing, the police, along with the family, had checked the same water tank but found nothing there.

The next day, his case was transferred back to the Bilal Colony police station from the AVCC, Pervez told Dawn.com.

The broader picture

Sarim’s autopsy reports concluded that he was murdered after being subjected to sexual assault. It stated that the minor had suffered 12 different injuries/wounds on various parts of the body and “all are antemortem (prior to death) except one injury”.

Although the body was found 11 days after his disappearance, the autopsy report stated that the five-year-old had died “approximately four to five days” before the post-mortem examination, casting doubts on the police’s efforts to recover him.

According to Sahil, a non-profit organisation, kidnapping was among the top crimes that led to child sexual abuse followed by cases of rape and sodomy. In most of the crimes committed against children, abusers were related or known to the children or the family, it deduced.

In its ‘Cruel Numbers’ report for January to June 2024, Sahil found that children between the ages of five and 15 were at high risk of sexual abuse and pornography, most of them boys.

GRAPHICS: DAWN

Police surgeon Dr Summaiya Syed also noticed a similar trend. “Children brought dead to us are mostly boys as compared to girls and they are under the ages of five and six years … boys are now at a greater risk today than let’s say five years ago,” she told Dawn.com.

Advocate Mehdi explained why boys were now more vulnerable. “We have not developed a level of sanity regarding children,” he said.

“Let’s say a boy is going somewhere with someone, no one will stop him in the area. But if that child is a girl, everyone will be concerned. This factor makes boys more vulnerable and easy traps because society doesn’t look at them in that way.”

The Sahil report further highlighted that children, particularly boys, were also more vulnerable to internal trafficking — when a person is taken from one city to another without their consent for “compelled labour” or “commercial sex acts” as per the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act, 2018 or TIP Act — a trend widely reported in urban areas such as Karachi and Lahore.

The aforementioned law says that the police are responsible for investigating such offences. However, if the crime involves transporting a victim into or out of Pakistan, the responsibility shifts to the Federal Investigation Authority.

According to data available with Dawn.com, of the 30 child kidnapping cases registered in the South Zone between July and December 2024, three invoked the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act, 2018. In districts Korangi and East, 14 and five FIRs, respectively, were registered under the TIP Act.

Sometimes, children also deliberately leave their homes over arguments or other reasons. In such cases, it becomes difficult to find the child because they remove the tracks of their recovery themselves; they are explicitly trying not to be found.

On the other hand, Imtiaz Soomro, a lawyer who works with Sahil, said that data showed girls were usually kidnapped for child marriage and child prostitution.

Six-month data obtained by Dawn.com, July to December 2024, from across Karachi showed that a majority of child kidnapping cases were registered in the Central district under section 365-B of the Pakistan Penal Code which pertains to kidnapping, abduction or inducing a woman to compel for marriage. A similar trend followed in the Korangi district.

Talking about Sarim’s case, SSP Zeeshan said that the FIR invoked Section 364-A of the Pakistan Penal Code which pertains to kidnapping or abducting a person under the age of 14. He noted that the case had various facets.

“Initially, the police were searching for him outside of his apartment complex because we didn’t have CCTV footage from the time he went missing (due to an electricity breakdown),” the cop said. “But after his body was found, the investigation is now back within the boundaries of his muhalla.”

He insisted that the police were working objectively on the case. “Parents can’t ever be satisfied,” he added.

When will the state act?

Sarim’s funeral was held the same day his body was found. His father was adamant; no more delays. The five-year-old boy was laid to rest at the Muhammad Shah graveyard, near Shadman. When Pervez returned home from the cemetery, he and his wife took sleeping pills and went to bed.

“But I woke up in the middle of the night and everything came back,” the father said. “The one thing that got stuck in my mind was the fact that Sarim was alive for at least four days before he was killed.”

“He could have been saved. He could have been among us,” Pervez rued. “How many children have to die for the state to act?”

We have legislation and case laws, we have courts, and Pakistan is even a signatory to UN rights conventions and treaties on child protection. Why are law enforcers unable to save children?

Because of the lack of implementation of these laws and rules, said Soomro.

“There are no gaps in our legal system, and these crimes have tough punishments, yet, the conviction rate remains low,” he pointed out, holding the police responsible for increasing acquittals in such cases. The lawyer highlighted that Justice Athar Minallah, in a 2019 judgment at the Islamabad High Court, had ruled that child abuse cases needed to be investigated by police officers of the assistant superintendent of police (ASP) rank and above.

“But in how many cases have you seen it being implemented? The police have a typical investigation style and are unaware of basic laws,” he lamented. “We don’t see the state respond until and unless it’s a case that has garnered the media’s attention.”

But what is the police’s investigation process when it comes to such cases? Dawn.com spoke to a serving police officer, who wished to remain anonymous. He explained that when it comes to missing children, a mechanism hardly exists because the manual on legal action in such cases was missing. Hence, they were rarely a priority.

Unlike the UK or USA, where a special department was responsible for the investigation and recovery of missing people, in Pakistan, there was no such apparatus. However, there were some usual steps that the police followed; increased patrolling, community involvement and missing alerts.

Advocate Mehdi agreed, highlighting the need to improve the prosecution system — police investigation and court adjudication. “If the investigating officer is not trained, there will be lacunas in the case and these crimes will continue to persist,” he said.

He stressed that the only way to improve prosecution was to include education related to the existing laws in the curriculum at police training centres and academies. Moreover, a special police unit should be established, equipped with the special expertise to investigate cases related to child protection.

At the same time, exclusive child courts must also be established.

“Unfortunately, we only have a single court which is dealing with all kinds of cases. An experiment was done in Karachi a few years back where child courts were established in Malir and City but their condition is not the best. The exclusivity that we were seeking in the dealing of children cases was not seen there,” Mehdi added.

The Supreme Court has also emphasised the same. In a 2024 judgment, the apex body asked the state to fulfil its obligation of setting up child-friendly courts under specially trained professional judges as the welfare and interest of minors should be the foundational principle in cases pertaining to children.

“It is the duty of the courts to assess and determine a course that would have served the best interest of the minors,” Justice Minallah observed, adding that children were vulnerable and traumatic experiences early in life could leave lifelong scars which could affect the quality of their lives.

Exposure of a child to the environment generally prevalent in ordinary courts could profoundly affect their impressionable minds, he noted. Moreover, insensitivity or lack of special expertise on the part of presiding judges in such matters could gravely affect the children’s rights and thus impact their lives adversely.

Courage is all it takes

On the other hand, child protection expert Valerie Khan Yousafzai highlighted that there was a dire need to mobilise the community in a healthy, gender-responsive, child-centric and inclusive manner.

“We should have a child protection committee in every locality. People have good intentions in our country, it is easy to mobilise them when it comes to protecting children and providing them with a haven,” she emphasised.

But community engagement could never be unguided. They needed to be told how to do it as per child protection standards; you don’t want vigilante groups, you want child protection groups. And all of this was the state’s responsibility.

One example to do so is to engage mosques, where announcements are made when a child goes missing. This, Valerie said, increased the chances of recovery.

“But this is not being used or invested in adequately by the state,” she regretted, pointing out that the government’s focus was on the retributive approach — death penalties and punishments. “We need to have the courage to be technical and take an evidence-based route where we use data that science is showing us, which talks about rehabilitation and prevention.”

“How many reformative, rehabilitative and reintegrative treatments do we have for the perpetrators?”

Meanwhile, Farooq underscored the importance of educating society, children, and parents. Children must be taught to memorise the phone numbers of either of their parents from a young age. This would lead to earlier reunions.

“There are so many cases where children are at shelter homes and their parents keep searching for them,” he said, “but they are unable to reunite because the children are unable to communicate.”

Secondly, it was now time that the world moved away from good and bad touch to “no touch”, Farooq stressed, adding that no form of touch should be allowed because the definition of good and bad had changed over time. Furthermore, children, especially those under the age of 10, should not be allowed to leave their homes without supervision.

These dos and don’ts are not just important inside homes but also at schools, where a child spends most of their time. Unfortunately, in our society, abuse and exploitation are stigmatised with honour, hence, conversation is missing from the social discourse.

But despite what the parents and society could do and continues to do, the reality is that children are being kidnapped, raped, trafficked, abused and killed. According to a police report released in November last year, the whereabouts of over 230 children — who were either kidnapped or went missing from January to September 2023 in Karachi — were still unknown.

At Sarim’s house, the air house is dense, everyone thinks about him, but no one is brave enough to speak up. The unannounced expectation that ‘life must go on’ weighs heavy, heavier than grief. “We have other children to look after … we can’t lose them,” said Pervez.

Aariz, the eldest brother, is now accompanied to the madrassah by his mother every day, who waits at the nearby park with other women, who have started doing the same. At home, the grandmother keeps a close watch on the youngest son, Azfar.

A month and a half after Sarim was killed, his perpetrators remain at large.