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Special report on child protection - Continued

[Pakistan] Child labourer, Rwalpindi. IRIN
Working children are a very common sight in NWFP
CHILD LABOUR Child labour is widespread across Asian countries, and Pakistan is no exception in this respect. Whereas the government estimates the number of child labourers at 3.3 million, unofficial sources put the number closer to eight million. According to a SPARC report, although officially children make up about seven percent of the total workforce in the country, such estimates omit children under 10 and those working in small family businesses, which are not registered with the government. Aid workers maintain that child labour is one of the key issues in child protection, as working children are also exposed to exploitation and abuse. Jabr noted that child labour was linked to poverty. "To me, an important condition to [make it possible to] address child labour is to get funding to reduce poverty," he said. He added that efforts should be made to protect children from strenuous labour, and they should also be provided with opportunities to access education. According to Jillani, lack of education renders millions of children vulnerable to labour and exploitation. "Then there is lack of proper legislation relating to child labour," he observed, adding that the country's huge informal sector employing millions of child labourers was unregulated. He maintained that given the country's economic circumstances, the problem of child labour would persist. At present, legislation permits children to be employed in non-strenuous domestic work, but they are often exploited. "The bulk of children are working in the informal sector, and any attempts to tackle the problem need to start at the informal sector," Jillani asserted. Islamabad has ratified seven of the eight ILO conventions, including Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour, signed in 2001 by the government of Pervez Musharraf. A law prohibiting the employment of children under the age of 14 in any factory, mine or in hazardous conditions was also implemented, but NGOs say there are still children working in these sectors. Subsequently, in January 2002, a proposal from the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, an advocacy group, was presented to Pakistani officials and employers in an effort to end child labour within the next 10 years. An ambitious programme to reduce poverty in the country from 32 percent to 15 percent, within the same time frame, is also being implemented. Efforts to eliminate child labour in carpet making and the football-stitching industry, both major export earners after cotton and textiles, have yielded mixed results. With the help of the International Labour Organisation and UNICEF, and encouraged by bilateral assistance from the West, including that of the United States, the two industries decided to make tangible efforts to eliminate, or at best reduce, child labour, which was further exacerbating the country's tattered image. In 1997, both the carpet and football industries embarked on child labour-elimination programmes. Today, the industries are reaping the benefits of their efforts - widely endorsed and acknowledged by those who had accused them in the past of exploiting children. While football manufacturers have more or less eradicated child labour in the Pakistani city of Sialkot, carpet makers are still working hard on how to curb the social evil, born out of the extreme poverty of rural landless labourers. ABUSE AND VIOLENCE Shabnam Shahid - not her real name - is a university student in her mid-twenties living with a scar. Although having a normal life, her childhood memories still haunt her. "I was sexually abused for six years as a child, by six different people," she told IRIN in Islamabad. Shahid maintained that all her abusers were adults whom she knew. "I never told anyone, because I always thought it was my fault. Either I was in the wrong place at the wrong time or I had behaved in some way to deserve it," she said, adding that she had accepted it as something that just happened. "It was probably God's way of punishing little girls who disobeyed their mothers or made them angry," she maintained. Such cases, however, are not rare. Humera Hussain, a programme coordinator with the Islamabad-based NGO working against child sexual abuse, Sahil, told IRIN that there were at least three reports of child abuse in the local press every day. "This is just the tip of the iceberg, as sex remains a taboo subject for most Pakistanis," she said. According to Sahil, of the 820 reported cases in Pakistani newspapers over the past year, 487, or some 59 percent, concerned girls, while the remaining 333 cases concerned boys. Furthermore, of the 1,576 abusers, 77 percent had been acquaintances. Hussein added that incest or sex between blood relatives was the most under-reported form of child sexual abuse. People in Pakistan are surprisingly tolerant of some forms of child sexual abuse, and male child prostitution is not only tolerated but seen as a status symbol in some parts of the country, according to a report entitled 'Confronting Reality' by the Pakistan Paediatric Association and Save the Children (Sweden). Pir Wadhai bus station in Rawalpindi close to Islamabad - an area of open sewers and hundreds of small restaurants, hotels, vegetable stands and workshops, and home to poor and marginalised Pakistanis as well as thousands of Afghan refugees - is a notorious centre for child sexual abuse. The district is awash with children and, given Pakistan's poor economic situation, they are often employed as cheap labour or in child prostitution. Hussain maintained that although the national policy on child sexual abuse was drafted three years earlier, it had yet to be implemented. Boys are sold for sex in many parts of Pakistan. In Bannu, a small city close to the border with Afghanistan in the NWFP, young dancing boys, known as lakhtay, are bought and sold. These boys dance during wedding parties and other festive occasions, but are also often sodomised by their owners. NCCWD's Mangi maintained that government recently banned 18,000 websites in an effort to stop child pornography. "We are also developing a code of conduct for the media so it has positive effects on children," he said. He added that they had asked the law enforcement agencies such as the police to take note of the situation in Pir Wadhahi. NCCWD in collaboration with NGOs has formed a core group to sensitise the police on issues of child sexual abuse. Other forms of violence against children in more formal places is also widespread. According to UNICEF's Jabr, corporal punishment remains a major concern. "Over the past year, I am told that there has been remarkable progress on this, especially in schools, because now it is part and parcel of educating teachers not to use physical force with kids," he said. Continued 

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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