perspective- child protection

Permitted age for employment of children as domestic workers

Do you know what the minimum age is for children in the different provinces of Pakistan to be employed as domestic workers? Child labour is a provincial subject in Pakistan after the 18th Constitutional Amendment in 2010. The 18th Constitutional Amendment devolved the issue of labour and employment to the provinces and each province is now responsible for enacting and…

Juvenile Offenders in Punjab

The total number of convicted and undertrial juveniles imprisoned in various borstal institutes and jails of Punjab province was 645 as on 15 March 2022 (Prisons Department, Govt. of Punjab). Out of the total number of juvenile offenders, 81% (523) juveniles were on trial (under trial) and 19% were convicted…

Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929 and Jinnah

The Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929 was drafted by Quaid-i-Azam- Mohammad Ali…

The Age Of Consent And The Borders Of Belief

ICT Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2025 marks a pivotal step toward a…

Pakistan’s Silent Emergency: Why Our Children Need A National Anti-Drug Policy Now

Every generation faces a defining challenge. For our parents, it was nation-building. For ours, it may well be saving our children from the growing menace of drugs. Across Pakistan, a silent epidemic is unfolding. Narcotics have found their way into our schools, colleges and universities, threatening not only individual lives…

Abuse Cycle

LULLED into a sense of false security by its own denial and apathy, Pakistan is a long way from achieving tangible solutions to the curse of child abuse. The state’s refusal to address the presence of this scourge, and the lifelong traumas associated with it, is a ticking time bomb…

No Sanctuary for Abuse

A place of learning should never become a place of fear. Yet another child has paid with his life for the unchecked culture of violence that continues to exist at places meant to educate. Fourteen-year-old Ali Haider, who had been sent to a madrassa, allegedly died from a brutal beating…

Protecting Our Children

When the most vulnerable members of a nation are repeatedly subjected to sexual violence, torture and murder, the crisis extends far beyond law and order. It becomes a moral failure. The past week has delivered two such horrifying reminders. In Sargodha, a seven-year-old girl was reported to have been sexually…

Drugs and Teens

A DECADE ago, during one of the ‘Growing Up’ sessions I was holding in Karachi schools, I talked to seventh graders about drugs and addiction. Their interest and giggling prompted me to ask whether they knew where drugs could be obtained. They named several locations. Later, I realised that drug…

Damaged Childhoods

CHILD abuse is so prevalent that the UN ranked Pakistan as the least safe country for children. Even so, more than five years after the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Act, 2020 — Pakistan’s first national child protection law — central provisos, including the agency for rapid alerts for missing…

Gender Progress

On May 11, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that that custody of a child cannot be granted to the grandmother or paternal aunt solely on the basis of the mother’s second marriage. The ruling came in connection with a case regarding the custody of a nine-year-old child. Custody had initially…

Child Marriage: a Persistent Form of Gender Inequality

Child marriage is not a tradition we can afford to romanticise. It is a violation of childhood, consent and opportunity. Defined as any formal or informal union where one or both parties are under 18, child marriage remains one of Pakistan’s most persistent forms of gender inequality. Despite legal prohibitions,…

A Girl’s Age

ON July 29, 2025, Maria Shahbaz, a 13-year-old Christian girl, was abducted in Lahore by her 30-year-old neighbour. She was subsequently forced to convert to Islam and marry her captor. A police investigation confirmed that the marriage certificate produced by the abductor was fabricated and not registered with any union…

Child Marriage Law

Child marriage in Pakistan has never been sustained by law alone. Instead, it has survived because the law itself has remained fractured. The passage of the Child Marriage Restraint Bill 2026 by the Punjab Assembly is therefore significant for what it exposes across the federation, which is a deeply uneven…

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