Two persons were detained on Monday, according to the Mandi Bahauddin police, when they broke up an accused group of child predators who were allegedly filming their attacks while they sexually assaulted children.
According to Dawn.com, District Police Officer (DPO) Ahmad Mohiuddin took action after noticing four cases filed at the Civil Lines police station between September 24 and 29 under the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) Sections 375A (gang rape), 376iii (punishment for rape of a minor), and 511 (attempting to commit offenses punishable by life imprisonment).
DPO Mohiuddin stated that he took notice right away and gave the district superintendent of police (DSP) instructions to apprehend the suspects and file an incident report as soon as possible. Following this, two suspects were taken into custody from the Makhanwala and Tariqabad areas, and raid teams confiscated a laptop, a USB drive, and a cell phone.
He further disclosed that a fourth suspect was evading capture and that one suspect had obtained temporary bail.
The DPO stated, “Police teams are looking for him right now.” “We are hoping to find him by tonight.”.
Ajmal Waheed Gul, a spokeswoman for the Mandi Bahauddin Police, informed Dawn.com that the children were lured by the arrested suspects to a shop where they were molested by the gang.
He said, “They used their phones to film the assaults and used the videos as blackmail.”
“These are members of the same gang,” the DPO stated, noting that the victims were undergoing medical examinations.
The victims, according to DPO Mohiuddin, varied in age from 8 to 13. Some of them, he claimed, declined to speak forward “because of social stigma.”
Prior to this, in July, the Mandi Bahauddin area recorded over 40 distinct incidences of kidnapping and sexual abuse against women.
The incidents happened between July 1 and July 24, according to 46 first information reports (FIRs) that Dawn.com was able to view.
Sections 376 (rape), 376iii (rape of a minor), 365B (kidnapping, abducting, or pressuring a woman to marry, etc.), 496-A (luring or removing or detaining a woman with criminal intent), 114 (abettor present when the offence is committed), and/or 511 (punishment for attempting to commit offences punishable with imprisonment for life or a shorter term) were the applicable PPC sections for the various cases.
Details on kidnapping, sexual assault, and physical abuse of young girls and adolescents under various pretenses and methods were made public by the FIRs.
The bulk of the impacted women and adolescents were underage females between the ages of 10 and 18, with ages ranging from 10 to 28.
Data gathered earlier this year by Sahil, an NGO that advocates for children’s rights, revealed that 11 children were assaulted daily in 2023, with the majority of the horrible deeds being committed by friends and family.
The study added that in 2023, a total number of 4,213 child abuse instances had been reported from all four provinces as well as the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB). incidents of child marriage, kidnapping, child missing, and child sexual abuse were among the total number of recorded incidents.
Based on a gender-divide analysis of the data, 2,251 (53%) and 1,962 (47%) of the victims of the total recorded instances were girls and boys, respectively. According to the age range recorded, boys were more likely than girls to experience abuse between the ages of 6 and 15 years old.
Furthermore, 0–5-year-old children were also victims of sexual abuse. The abuser’s category in the report stated that acquaintances were still the most active in child sexual abuse, along with relatives, family members, strangers and women abettors.
The survey also revealed that, of the 4,213 instances that were reported, 75% came from the capital region of Islamabad, 13% from Sindh, 5% from Punjab, 3% from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and 2% from Balochistan, Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB).
