IN her tragically short life, Zainab from Kasur might have dreamed of being many things, but no one can argue that she would have wanted to posthumously become the poster child of a nation’s desperate appeal to eradicate the blight of child sexual abuse.

Yet, spurred by her family’s understandable need for justice, this is the mantle the media, the government and the superior courts foisted on her in their collective hand-wringing and notice-taking.

With such an appropriation of grief, however, comes a heavy responsibility.

So, three months on, honour-bound by the oath we swore to not let this happen again to any other child, we must ask whether our professed resolve was not merely reflexive.

We must ask because, over the last weekend alone, six children were reported raped and one boy reported missing in Kasur.

In Sahiwal that same weekend, an eight-year-old girl was burnt alive, while a week earlier in Faisalabad, another minor girl was found murdered — both allegedly after being raped.

The absence of official statistics is almost immaterial — even one child is one too many.

But, prima facie, such aggregated reports cannot be taken to suggest that the prevalence of child abuse is higher in Kasur or any other district in Punjab compared with the rest of the country.

What they do reveal is that, despite the media focus on Kasur’s paedophilia problem that began in 2015 and was renewed in 2018, little appears to have changed on the ground for Punjab’s vulnerable children.

They reflect a discrepancy between the provincial government’s rhetoric — of having improved governance standards — versus the reality.

Punjab Police remains blatantly compromised by inaction and indifference. Fourteen years since passing a child protection law, investigations and prosecutions (when they occur) are typically mishandled, and protective services exist almost in name only.

Meanwhile, the efficacy of suo motu action by appellate courts warrants scrutiny as a top-down approach to a bottom-up problem if they elicit mere tokenistic interventions that gloss over the need for sustained reform of the criminal justice system.

The media, for its part, shares culpability.

While the fourth estate can act as a robust mechanism in ensuring accountability, after Zainab’s murder, it in large part succumbed instead to sensationalist and speculative reporting for the sake of ratings, and other ignoble ends, before moving on to the next issue.

For the child victims of sexual abuse however, without justice, there is no moving on.

Published in Dawn, April 11th, 2018