After reading this news today morning, that little feminist part of me was brutally killed. I realized it’s not only women who are sexually abused or raped, but men too are the victims. In this case, boys, very young boys are the victims. 90% of street children in Pakistan are victims of sexual abuse at some point in their lifetime. With girls rarely going out alone on Pakistani streets, children who fall prey to rapes are boys – some as young as 6 years old.
‘Once, there was a boy on the bus and everyone had sex with him,’ confesses Ijaz, who admits raping 12 different children during his career as a bus conductor in Pakistan. ‘I did it too but what else could I do? They invited me. And he was that kind of boy anyway.’ Sexual abuse in Pakistan is extensive. An estimated survey reveals that more than 4 million children are dragged into child labor due to poverty in a very early age and of those, more than a million live on the streets. A recent survey of 1800 men in the country found out that every third person believes raping a boy is not a crime, it’s not even a bad thing to do.
One such unfortunate incident happened with Naeem, 13, who has been living on the streets on and off, after he flew off from his brother who used to beat him repeatedly after their parents death. ‘I was lying here sleeping and four people grabbed me and threw me into a car,’ he sobs. He was just 8 years old then. ‘One was a bus driver, the others were heroin addicts. All four of them raped me.’
Many of the abusers are bus drivers. One man who knows it too well is Hassan Deen, an entrepreneur who rents bed and sometimes from me and he says he’ll pay an extra 50 (50p) or 100 rupees (£1) if I can get him a boy,’ He also added: ‘There’s often a kid wandering the streets alone. We tell these boys we’ll provide food and shelter if they come with us. That’s how we lure them in.’
Naeem isn’t alone who was sexually abused. pedophilic men, but so far, he has somehow managed to escape. He said, ‘I don’t get scared if I have a friend with me. I get bothered a lot by the bus driver, the van driver. They tell me to climb on the roof of the bus and do bad things with them. Sometimes they offer me a soft drink in return.’
The impact of this shameful act on children is severe. Along with the psychological disorders, a Save the Children report shows that 1 out of every 10 children are murdered by the men who sexually abuse them. Naeem, who once had been the victim of this deadly crime, has now turned himself into one of those abusers. ‘There was a boy, about 10 or 11,’ he confesses, shame-faced. ‘I took him to the cinema and spent money on him and he was OK with it. But when we left the cinema, he said he didn’t want to do it anymore, so then I grabbed his hand and forced him.’
Although there are Pakistani laws to protect children, police rarely bother to the plight of these victims, many saying that continuous Taliban bomb threats keep them away from saving boys. See what the cricketer turned politician Imran Khan has to say in this video:
Totally blank about this tragic news. Please share this video to a larger extent, so that those pedophilic men die of shame.
Have anything to say on this? Please feel free to share your thoughts on this brutality in the comments sections below.
