Child Abduction is the offense of wrongfully removing or wrongfully retaining, detaining or concealing a child or baby. Abduction is defined as taking away a person by persuasion, by fraud, or by open force or violence.
According to cruel numbers data report published by Sahil, Child abductions and kidnappings are on the increase, with almost 1386 reported cases in the past year’s averaging the daily abduction of 4 children per day of which 127 children’s were abducted from Balochistan.
As per express tribune newspaper report on 18th August, 2016 the wife of retired DSP Anwar Pari, a resident of Gulbahar, was arrested for her involvement in child kidnapping and trafficking cases in the city of Peshawar. She was among the nine members of the gang who had been arrested in the same case last week.
Increasingly, news and social media is filled with stories of more child kidnappings. Sometimes there is word of a mafia operating, running gangs of criminals. Some say vans suddenly arrive, people jump out, grab little children, and speed away. Other, far more disturbing accounts, tell of organ trade and dead children. Yet none of this has bothered the government enough to offer a formal statement acknowledging or denying such reports. I think the number of unreported cases will be higher as victim families usually avoid taking police help. Children are among the most vulnerable in our society and have been used for everything from prostitution to working as child jockeys in the Gulf. Also, they are kidnapped for pedophilia, ransom, beggary, militancy, suicide bombing and even for extraction of vital organs. People in Balochistan, especially, are now terrified. Some are also calling for delaying opening the schools till this matter is settled first. Everybody is upset; just not the government.
People, naturally, have taken to vigilantism. Social media tells of people being caught red handed and roughed up by the people; the police nowhere to be seen. In one incident, caught on film, the law did not arrive for two hours after an attempted kidnapping was foiled. While two of the three alleged culprits got away, people beat the one that was caught within an inch of his life. The police did slightly better in KP, arresting a seven-member gang, five of which were females, some in the health department. These are chilling facts. Yet even more frightening is that they do not bother the government at all.
The abduction of children by people other than their parents – which could include a stranger luring a child into a car with sweets or a teenage girl being taken willingly by an older man – rose twice as fast as parental abductions. Child kidnapping in Punjab has been voiced for so far but in case of Balochistan if you refer to Sahil’s cruel numbers reports … you will find only few cases of child sexual abuse and the rest are kidnapping and missing children.