Why are children not seen on Kasur streets?

Before mobile phones snatched their childhood charm, children of all genders and backgrounds used to hit the streets after school and would keep on playing till dusk. 

Now, in posh areas, a few children are seen run bicycles in the evening in front of their houses. That is always under the vigilant eyes of their parents of some guards. 

In lower-middle-class neighborhoods, however, children keep the streets alive with their games. 

But not in Kasur, anymore. 

If one happens to be in Kasur city nowadays, they will notice that neighborhoods streets are calm and devoid of usual children’s laughter, noise and thrill: the power of Nature that makes the life beautiful is missing. A few children, if seen on the streets, are accompanied by their elders, holding their fingers with a firm grip. Fear is visible children’s faces while elders seem under the stress of acute caution.

Reason?

The city streets discovered on January 9 the 12th body of a minor girl, who had been missing since Jan 4, and later her body was found at a garbage site near her house. A postmortem report stated she was raped and gagged. Earlier, in 11 months, as many minor boys and girls have met the same tragedy.

In all incidents, the paedophile(s) used the same method: kidnap the child ages 5 to 10 from the street and dump their body in some under-construction house or garbage site after two or three days after molesting and gaging them. Whenever a child went missing, the helpless parents with local residents had launched a frantic search besides alerting the police. The fruitless exercise has been done in all cases.       

Police remain clueless in their search for the psychopath(s). In all cases, the police followed their traditional methods: after every incident of killing, they would round up the addicts, petty and hardened felons and the close relatives of the deceased child and release them after a few days of interrogation, declaring them innocent and closing the file of the case. In one case, a minor child, who was abducted, raped and dumped at a deserted house was found alive but unconscious. She has been struggling for life in the Lahore Children’s Hospital for the last three months. Police are banking upon her recovery that she will provide them with some valuable clue leading to the identity of the child molester(s). As time is precious in such case and given the age of the child, it is very much unlikely that she remembers the graphic details of the traumatic incident even after the passage of three months. In the latest episode, a video footage is making rounds on the social media where the deceased girl is seen walking with a stranger in Peerowala Road locality of the district. It has yet to be seen how police make the most of the precious proof.     

At last, the 12^th death prodded Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif to take notice of the killing spree directing the police personnel to arrest the culprits. Kasur, the land of Sufi poet Baba Bulleh Shah who preached peace and love in his poetry, has been in the news for anti-child acts for some time. Earlier, it hogged the world attention after news reports that several children were molested and filmed by gangsters in Hussain Khan Wala. The rehabilitation of those children was never undertaken by the government or any other organization.

The killings of minor boys and girls pose a challenge to police and the government functionaries. The government has invested a good amount in the professional development of police force, so the force must resolve the cases and make the Kasur city safe for children again.