Pakistan's Child Grooming Crisis: When Silence and Influence Protects Predators

Recent provincial surveys, combined in a 2026 UNICEF and National Commission for Human Rights report, estimated that approximately 8.6 million children in Pakistan are engaged in child labour, including 6.6 million working in hazardous conditions. However, the consequences of this extend far beyond lost wages or interrupted schooling. 

Depending on the province, between 32 and 58 per cent of children in child labour reported work-related injury or illness, while 19 to 32 per cent of working adolescents reported symptoms of depression. The surveys also recorded exposure to psychological, physical or sexual abuse among approximately 14 to 22 per cent of children in child labour across different regions.

This vulnerability is intensified by Pakistan’s education emergency. UNICEF estimates that 25.1 million children aged five to 16 around 35 per cent of that age group are out of school. In Balochistan alone, nearly 69 per cent of school-age children are estimated to be outside the classroom. Children excluded from education are more likely to enter informal workplaces where employers, contractors, landlords and other authority figures can control their movements and threaten their livelihoods. Child labour does not automatically result in sexual exploitation, but isolation, dependency and weak adult oversight create precisely the conditions in which grooming, coercion and abuse are harder to detect and more dangerous to report.

Grooming Thrives Where Children Cannot Speak

Grooming is a process through which an offender builds access to a child, gains the child’s or family’s trust, creates emotional or material dependency, and gradually introduces secrecy, coercion or sexual abuse. Offenders may offer gifts, employment, religious instruction, protection, transport or attention. They may also threaten children with violence, disgrace, arrest or retaliation against their families.

In Pakistan, these risks are intensified by poverty, child labour, limited access to education, rigid hierarchies and the power exercised by employers, landlords, police officers, religious instructors and politically connected families. Children who depend on adults for food, shelter, work or schooling are especially vulnerable. According to a report by UNICEF and National Commission for Human Rights, Pakistani children face physical, psychological and sexual violence, exploitation and trafficking. It has also noted that Pakistan still lacks a coordinated public child-protection case-management and referral system aligned with international standards.

The Recorded Cases Are Only the Visible Part

Sahil, a Pakistani child-protection organisation, documented 3,630 child-abuse cases reported in 81 newspapers during 2025. Of those, 2,003 involved child sexual abuse. The monitoring also identified 238 reported cases of gang sexual assault, including gang rape and gang sodomy.

These figures should not be mistaken for the total number of children abused in Pakistan. They represent cases that reached newspapers not a comprehensive national crime survey or administrative database. Children whose families remained silent, whose complaints were rejected or whose cases attracted no media attention would not necessarily appear in the count.

Pakistan’s own National Commission on the Rights of Child has identified stigma, lack of awareness, procedural barriers and mistrust of law enforcement as reasons victims may not seek help. Its assessment also found that local reporting of online child sexual exploitation remained extremely low relative to the volume of suspicious online material associated with the country. The real scale is therefore difficult to establish. But inadequate data should never be confused with an absence of abuse. It is itself evidence of institutional failure.

Organised Networks, Not Isolated Predators

Sahil's own trend data suggests these networks are not shrinking. The organisation recorded a 20 percent rise in child sexual abuse cases in just the first half of 2025 compared with the same period a year earlier, and the year-end total of 238 gang-based sexual assaults — split roughly between gang rape and gang sodomy.

Pakistan's most notorious case shows what that organisation can look like at scale. The Kasur scandal, uncovered in 2015 in Hussain Khanwala village, involved a ring of roughly 20 to 25 men who filmed an estimated 280 children, mostly boys between 6 and 14, over nearly a decade beginning in 2006. The gang produced around 400 videos, using them both to extort silence from families and to sell footage locally and, by some accounts, to buyers abroad. Punjab police and a sitting provincial lawmaker were accused of trying to bury the case, and an initial government inquiry dismissed the allegations as baseless, a finding that only deepened public anger and forced a judicial commission to reopen the matter.

Kasur is not an isolated failure. In January 2018, the same district produced Pakistan's other landmark case: the rape and murder of seven-year-old Zainab Ansari. Her killer was later linked by DNA evidence to at least five other similar murders committed within a three-kilometre radius over the preceding year, a pattern investigators had missed for months. In the panic that followed, police shot dead a man they had wrongly accused in an earlier case. That two of the country's defining child-abuse scandals emerged from a single district, years apart, says something about whether the institutional lessons of 2015 were ever absorbed.

When the State Shields the Accused

Pakistan's own conduct toward its citizens convicted in these cases has, at state level, echoed the pattern of protection over accountability found domestically. Rochdale grooming-gang figures such as Shabir Ahmed, Qari Abdul Rauf and Adil Khan were stripped of British citizenship following their convictions specifically to enable deportation to Pakistan. Islamabad has refused to accept them, arguing the men are no longer Pakistani nationals since they had renounced that citizenship, even as Pakistani officials simultaneously pressed, in December 2025, for the extradition of two UK-based critics of Pakistan's military establishment as a condition of any cooperation. When Shabir Ahmed walked free from a UK prison in July 2026 after serving fourteen of his twenty-two-year sentence, he remained in Britain because the two governments could not agree on terms, with a senior Pakistani official accusing London of a "colonial mindset" for continuing to press the issue.Whether the mechanism is a police station in Kasur, a seminary in Chakwal, or an extradition standoff in Islamabad, the throughline is the same: what determines whether a perpetrator connected to Pakistan faces justice or finds protection is rarely the severity of the crime. It is proximity to power.

Disclaimer: This image is taken from Humanium.