The lifestyles of wealthy Pakistanis have a criminally dark underbelly

Three years ago, I reported a neighbor for violence towards a child domestic worker in Islamabad. When the police arrived, the little girl whom I had heard being beaten and threatened answered the door and told them she was seven years old. Despite a police intervention, it is probable she was just sent to another house for employment.

I am reminded of that incident these days as the news circulates of late, of children being abused in the dark underbelly of Pakistan’s domestic work industry: ‘Child maids.’ The news cycle has been filled with stories of numerous such underage working children being tortured, abused, and raped. As I write, 13-year-old Rizwana who has been fighting for her life in hospital, is slowly regaining her health while a judge’s wife is being tried for her torture and attempt to murder, owing to social media outrage. And yet, in a heartbreaking moment to really put everything into perspective, when Rizwana was asked if she wanted anything in the hospital, she asked for a doll.

The International Labor Organization has reported that one in every four households in Pakistan employs a child in domestic work, predominantly girls, aged 10 to 14 years. The normalization of this trauma inflicted upon these children is the rot in Pakistan’s upper classes.

In another viral video from this month, a 10-year-old girl is seen with her clothes removed as she writhes in pain on the ground after being brutally raped. She died from her injuries. In Pakistan’s southern Sindh province, the political culture allows for these heinous crimes to happen often, where the poor are kept criminally dependent on their ‘feudal lords’ and obligated to send their young daughters to serve them as part of debt payments.

In Pakistan’s heartland, Punjab, it is far too easy to get a child worker for your home. All one has to do is connect with desperate and willing parents. Potential employers openly post their requirements of child workers on popular Facebook groups.

This is modern day slavery. The children employed in these households are not old enough to consent and have no free will. They eat what they are fed and do everything they are ordered to do. A child’s minor mistake, like eight-year-old Zohra Shah three years ago, who left her employer’s parrot cage open, can result in death.

In 2020, three rights groups jointly issued a report that revealed more than 140 cases of abuse, torture, rape and murders of child domestic workers were reported in Pakistani media during the past 10 years, with 34% of the children below the age of 10. The actual figures, it goes without saying, are assumed to be many multiples of that number.

Statistics reveal that child labor in domestic work is more common in urban centers than in Pakistan’s rural areas, which informs that in the face of politics, wealth and privilege, humanity and morality often shy away, revealing the exploitative foundation upon which power, wealth and comfort reside. Despite the existence of some domestic child labor laws across Pakistan, their word is weak and their translation from the page to reality is all but missing. With no employment contracts for domestic workers, no terms and conditions laid out that bind the employer to employ people of age, to provide security and human dignity in their workplaces, repeated exploitation all but continues unabated.

Everybody is a part of the murderous problem, as the communal acceptance of children employed in homes is normalized. To end the practice will require an entire legal and social upheaval to check one’s own self, and to put one’s own house in order first. 

- Farwa Naqvi is a practicing integrative psychotherapist, broadcast analyst and writer.