LAHORE: Why do children get lost? The person heading the family tracing team at the Child Protection and Welfare Bureau that has rescued more than 68,000 children since its inception in 2004, says, “At the heart of this problem is poverty and broken families.”
Parents and guardians, who swarm at the gate of the Child Protection and Welfare Bureau (CPWB) Lahore, are visibly poor. Inside the bureau, a rope tied end to end before children’s living quarters, bars visitors from going further. Here too impoverished faces anxiously wait to meet their children.
A little further from this point is a small park with benches and installations such as a merry-go-round. Some women were waiting to meet children. A Daadi (paternal grandmother) had admitted her grandson here because the father (her son) and his wife (step-mother) would beat the child on one pretext or the other.
The old woman comes to meet him once a month. The father never came to see the child. Another visitor, a Naani (maternal grandmother) had applied for custody of the child. She learnt from social media that her grandson had been tortured by his father. He tied the child’s hands and feet and beat him up mercilessly. A neighbour made a video of that and informed the CPWB. The video reached the grandma after two months. The child’s mother had died and his step-mother and step-siblings treated him inhumanly. While beatings were a routine, they would also not feed him. He would be beaten for eating from the fridge. Another woman, a phupi (paternal aunt) had come to meet a nephew and a niece she had admitted when their mother died and her brother remarried. There are several such stories of broken families here.
In the admin office a woman and a 16-year-old boy were sitting face to face. The boy had thrown his head down. They were mother and son. The woman kept pleading that he returns home with her. He kept mum. The father and a male cousin were also there. The parents were addicts. The paternal uncle had brought the children to the bureau.
This family was well-to-do, educated, but addiction had made their three sons leave home and take refuge in CPWB. The 16-year-old boy, the eldest of them, had failed twice in class 7. He said he could not focus on anything when father vomits because of drug overdose and mother falls unconscious after taking drugs. A cousin was pleading for custody of children. He said he would get them admitted to a good institution where they would live in a hostel and he would take financial responsibility but the CPWB told the family to appear in court and follow the due procedure. Everyone has to. A sessions judge appointed by the high court hears the cases in the child court where every child records her/his statement.
The staff of Child Protection and Welfare Bureau rescue lost boys and girls, trace their parents, feed, clothe, educate and groom the children while they are in their custody and do not turn a child away if the family isn’t there. While the primary function of CPWB is to rescue children, trace families and give back children in safe hands, it is home to more than 500 children.
The CPWB receives five children every day through Helpline 1121 alone while the staff rescues 200 to 300 children every month in Lahore alone.
Little ones who have lost family, find refuge here. Two such boys rescued by CPWB in 2005, are now college and university students and live here. At the same time, they are working as child attendants at the bureau which means taking care of and grooming little boys.
The Child Protection and Welfare Bureau is a small town populated with little boys and girls and some adults deputed for their welfare. Once children are rescued, they are handed over to parents through court which is housed inside the bureau.
Two child protection officers are deputed at all the three points in the city where runaway children reach; they are Data Darbar, Lorri Adda and Railway Station. Children, who have wandered a long way away from home, are picked and brought to the bureau on charge of awaragardi. The bureau came into being after the Javed Iqbal case. CPWB has been actively discouraging use of children for begging by picking them from roads and giving them awareness.
There is a nursery for newborns that CPWB rescues from roadsides and skips while one was found abandoned by roadside in Murree. They are taken care of by medical staff, nurses and a male paediatrician and are adopted within 3-4 days by a couple on a surety bond of one million rupees in the baby’s name. The CPWB keeps track of the adopted babies till they are 18 years old. Around 25-35 babies are adopted from here every year. A large number of people approach the bureau for adoption.
CPWB Chairperson Sarah Ahmad takes regular notice of crimes against children and gets FIRs registered against criminals. CPWB is funded solely by the Punjab Government while Unicef is preparing a data base for CPWB.