[DAWN] IN Kasur district, Punjab, a gang of men sexually assaulted several children -- it is still not certain how many -- over several years, filmed them being abused and sold the videos to other paedophiles. Details of the abuse, which emerged some days ago after festivities between villagers and the police over the latter's failure to arrest all the abusers, left the entire nation shocked, with people making emotional calls demanding that the perpetrators be hanged.Child abuse is insidious in all countries and incredibly hard to eliminate. Just last month a BBC report about child abuse in the United States quoted the FBI as saying that child abuse levels are at an all-time high in that country. The report blamed "poverty, deprivation and exploitation" as the reason why thousands of American children are abused every year.
It's obvious that poverty, deprivation and exploitation cause the same problems in Pakistain: open any newspaper on any given day and it is fairly likely that a report of child sexual abuse from somewhere in the country will jump out from the pages. A lack of willpower to prosecute criminals of all kinds -- not just paedophiles -- means there is no deterrent for child abusers. And Pakistain's culture of secrecy around sexual abuse ensures that these crimes are almost never reported to the police. The recent documentary Pakistain's Hidden Shame which examines paedophilia in Beautiful Downtown Peshawar
...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire.
created a stir when it was released last fall, but since then, little to nothing has been done at any level to address the issues the film raised.