Or that discussion veers toward morality, sometimes religion. Last month, the government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, in the northwest, issued an order that required school-going girls as young as 10 to wear an abaya, a full length robe. As if rampant child abuse were a result of, and maybe punishment for, our sins.

The notice was later withdrawn, but for a couple of days gray-haired, pious men sat on TV shows shaking their heads and lecturing the country on the need to cover the bodies of preteen girls as the only way to protect them from being raped or harassed. Religion and tradition were invoked. Man’s beastly nature was mentioned. To make an argument for the hijab, the ridiculous hijab ban in France was trotted out.

When the lawyer Reema Omar pointed out that half the children abused in Pakistan actually are boys and asked what dress code the government had in mind for them, she was shouted at and asked if she would like the girls to go around in bikinis. In all the fiery debate, nobody could come up with a solution for how to dress up a four-year-old boy to save his life.

When we can’t hide behind morality or religion there is always a conspiracy theory. “Kasur is in the spotlight right now. Some gangs may be operating here in order to defame the country,” Sarah Ahmad, the chairwoman of the Child Protection and Welfare Bureau in Punjab Province, told a reporter. Our reaction is always to become defensive.

Defend our city, defend our culture, defend our humanity, and do it while someone’s child somewhere is being lured into a rickshaw and taken to a construction site never to return alive or, if lucky, to come back traumatized for life. Maybe it’s true. Maybe if we were better Muslims, or even average human beings, our children would be safer.

Or maybe if we all had more money our children would be safer. In theory at least, middle-class and affluent children are relatively safe. They still fall prey to a family member or household help who lives in close proximity — actually, I don’t have one intimate friend who wasn’t sexually abused as a child. But they are still alive. As children, they had homes and schools and, usually, some elder around to provide some measure of safety.

What about the four-year-olds who are on their own? Last year, nearly 23 million Pakistani children weren’t going to school. They were working in bazaars, cafes and sweatshops or just loitering around, waiting for their parents to return from their hard day’s labor. In many households, a child under 10 is looking after four younger siblings all day.