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Old Friday, June 08, 2012
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Dying young in the throes of poverty

Dr. Zaheer Ahmad Babar


According to a newspaper report, published in the last week of May 2012, a 15-year-old maid was tortured to death, allegedly by her employer and his family in the Garhi Shahu area of Lahore. The family suspected that the girl was involved in a theft.

The area police inquiries showed that one Asif Butt had employed two sisters - Robia and Sobia of Sheikhupura - as maids some five years ago. On the day of the incident, the family tortured Robia whom they accused of committing theft. She succumbed to her injuries after a couple of hours. Asif informed the family of the victim that the girl had died of illness. The family took the body to their native town and came to know that Robia was beaten up as they noticed scars on her body.

This is not the sole incident of its kind. During the past years, the national press has been publishing reports about deaths of servants and maids at the hands of employers, and a visible hike has been witnessed in such incidents. Mostly such housemaids and servants are very young and fall in the category of child labour. Once their parents hand them over to some well-to-do families, they are at the mercy of those families. Living in those houses as domestic servants, they lose their childhood in servitude. And what is more horrible is that some lose even their lives.

According to some unofficial figures, three million children in the country are employed in the shadow economy, and a large number of them serve as domestic servants.

According to a newspaper survey published in a daily, many families prefer to employ young boys and girls as domestic servants in major cities, including the federal capital and Lahore. They accept low wages, stay with the family and are considered safe, obedient and easy to control and bully.

According to another newspaper report, an 11-year-old boy Ali Shan, worked as a servant at the house of a grade 18 government employee in Islamabad. On January 5 this year, the landlady informed the police that Shan had committed suicide by hanging himself in the living room. However, the Golra police, who arrived to investigate found that circumstantial evidence did not prove her claim. Shan's body was not hanging, but on its knees with a curtain that was still on its railing with its lower portion passing through the sweater he had on. That made the police arrest the husband and wife on a murder charge.

Later on, the police suspicions were confirmed by the autopsy carried out on the body at PIMS. The body bore no sign of hanging, nor any injuries. Instead the autopsy suggested the boy had been strangled as his neck had a round mark and not the 'V' mark that signifies a hanging.

According to other such reports, on July 24, 2010, teenager housemaid Salima Bibi was found dead with a bullet in her body at the house of her employer in the federal capital. Police investigation proved she was shot dead. Another housemaid died at the hands of her employers in the Bhara Kahu outskirts during the same year. Her brutally tortured body was found in a wooded area near Rawal Lake. She was hit on her head and her neck was slit. Police identified her as Maria Talib Hussain from Multan, working as a housemaid. Her employer, assistant director of a government department, had reported to the police the previous day that she had disappeared with his family's ornaments and cash. But during the investigation his wife told the police that while interrogating Maria for the missing ornaments, she hit her on the head which proved fatal.

In yet another such incident in August, Taqi Usman, a 12-year-old domestic servant from Chiniot was allegedly clubbed to death in Lahore by his employer for not feeding the house pet. Fourteen-year-old Ahsan Haider was killed on suspicion of stealing the sound system from the music academy where he was employed.

Another suspected killing that was highlighted in the media was of Shazia, a young Christian girl who died on January 22, 2010, in a Lahore hospital. Her death sparked protests in the Christian community and her mother lodged a case with the police alleging that her employer Advocate Chaudhry Naeem had tortured, raped and murdered her. Later, the lawyer was acquitted of the charges by the court.

All such incidents highlight the need for enacting stricter laws for the protection of young people working as domestic help. State of Pakistan's Children, a report compiled by the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), claims as many as eight cases of severe torture against domestic child servants led to their deaths during the previous year.

A spokesperson for SPARC said: "It is being observed that every fourth house in Islamabad employs a child as a domestic servant. These children are brought from poor parts of the country, like Rahimyar Khan and Multan to serve as domestic servants." She demanded that both the federal and provincial governments take effective measures to check growing violence against child domestic workers and respond to the situation by adding Child Domestic Labour in the list of banned occupations under the Employment of Children Act 1991.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which sets out the political, cultural, social, health and economic rights of a child (under the age of 18), has been ratified by 194 countries. Pakistan is one of the first 20 countries to have signed and ratified the Convention.

Article 32 of the Convention says, "The right of the child to be protected from 'economic exploitation' and from performing any work that is likely to be 'hazardous' or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health physical, mental or otherwise."

Iftikhar Mubarik, the programme manager of Violence Against Child Labourers run by SPARC, identified domestic employment as the worst form of child labour. Mubarik told this writer in Islamabad recently that domestic labour deprives young children of several rights that have been identified by the state. It has 'no specified working hours' which often victimises young children to a routine devoid of education, rest and leisure.

Section 7 of the Employment of Children Act 1991 states, "The period of work on each day shall be so fixed that no period shall exceed three hours and that no child shall work for more than three hours before he has an interval of at least one hour for rest." The Act which defines a child as a person below the age of 14, while prohibiting certain occupations for a child fails to address child labour in the domestic sector.

According to an ILO estimate, in Pakistan every fourth house employs a child for work. Mubarik said that in the previous year as many as ten cases of child domestic servants being tortured and killed were reported.

According to the SPARC investigations, child domestic labour is practised in all provinces of Pakistan; most cases of violence towards child domestic labour occur in the Punjab, reveal the research studies. The Child Rights Movement (CRM) launched their Punjab chapter during the last year. The body comprises of almost 20 NGOs, hailing from various districts of the Punjab. The CRM has demanded that the federal government establish the National Commission for the Rights of the Child in compliance with the recommendations given by the UN Committee on Child Rights in its concluding observations to Pakistan. A delegation of the organisation called on the Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and demanded inclusion of domestic labour in the schedule of the 34 banned Hazardous Occupations as defined by the Employment of Children Act (ECA) 1991.

-cuttingedge
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