A six-year-old girl was raped tortured and beaten to death with a heavy stone in a killing that has sparked outrage and calls for justice in Pakistan. After being killed, the body of the youngster, named locally as Seema, was stuffed into a sack and dumped in a deserted chicken farm.
An 18-year-old neighbor allegedly snatched her after she left her family’s home in the city of Nowshera, in the north of the country, to go outside and play. A search was launched after she failed to return home, and mosques played calls on their loudspeakers on behalf of her worried parents.
It is claimed that the suspect helped the girl’s family search for her after they reported her missing, and he allegedly told police he killed her so she couldn’t identify him after he raped her. The search came to a tragic end when local residents discovered the sack containing her body, and alerted the police. Police said Seema was raped and tortured before she was killed. Armed with a large stone, her killer repeatedly struck her over the head and other parts of her body.
Children are one of the most vulnerable groups in any society, lacking the vocabulary, clear understanding, and often the support they need to confront their abusers. From a young age, they are taught not to question authority — the adults in their midst — and often suffer alone, suppressing whatever horrors they are made to endure in silence. Many abusers are from within the family, or close to the family members, earning and abusing their trust. In most recent data, the majority of children that were subjected to abuse were between the ages of six and 15, but there were some even under the age of one. Let the horror of that figure sink in.
The seriousness of the matter demands that the government take whatever help it can from civil society organizations. While some of them are monitoring incidents of children’s abduction, rape and murder, we need more investigative studies such as Accountability for Rape: A Case Study of Lodhran, carried out by the University College, Lahore.
A key finding in most rape studies is that children are unusually vulnerable at schools and madrasahs and many of the culprits are members of victims’ families or known to them. Stricter control of educational centers and essential sex education for children and their mothers are fundamental to strategies to protect the nation’s precious children from the most horrible cycle of abduction, rape and murder.
