The land without children

There are mythical tales about lands in which no children live or from which they have been driven away. It is not a precise parallel, but we have a land from which more and more children are being sent or taken away by parents who are desperate to give them a better future – a more secure life in which they have opportunities to excel.

Studies to prove this have not been conducted sufficiently, but evidence still exists from across the strata of classes. We saw something similar in the late 1970s and 1980s as members of minority communities packed up family homes and fled the country from the fear ushered in by General Ziaul Haq and the subsequent implementation of his repressive policies that deliberately targeted non-Muslims.

But now even the majority community feels compelled to send its children away. Of course, on the whole, only a small percentage of people will go. But even then, as we enter a new year, the trend is a disturbing one. We should be thinking about the terrible compulsions people face a little harder.

At the topmost tier of society, we have the elite class living with startling privilege and choosing to send children as young as 12-year-olds to elite boarding schools in the West, usually to the UK or the USA. In overall terms, their number is very limited. But many schools confirm that these figures have risen in the past decades. Is the choice merely a fashion statement like so much else in an increasingly warped society? Perhaps to some degree it is. Parents feel compelled to send children away – a parent usually moves in with the child to facilitate the ‘settling in’ period for fear of violence, kidnappings and also growing extremism away from home. The families split for a while due to the belief that children would be educationally and socially better off away from home. Of course other factors – like competitiveness – also play a role and it is hard to determine why some decisions are being made. Analysis would require more research. But the trend as a whole is very real and it does have significance in the context of a society and the way it is looked at by those who form a part of it.

At other social levels, motivations are different. We hear of the occasional child who turns up in a European city, or even an airport, alone, without any papers – the parents apparently hoping the abandoned child will be picked up by the state authorities and cared for by the nation to which he/she has been sent. This stems from a desire to give the child better opportunities – an education and a lifestyle that he/she will not be able to receive in the village or urban area of his/her home country.

There have indeed been cases where such children have been taken care of in Sweden, Germany and many other places. Tight visa controls and airport checks specifically designed to guard against this practice have come into place in many nations. Pakistan and Bangladesh are at the top of the list of countries from where children are brought or sent in alone and then left there in the desperate desire to give them a better life. Notably in the UK, attempts have been made to    pass off the children born in Pakistan as those of relatives who live in and have settled abroad. This too is becoming harder with DNA testing and other barriers that have emerged recently. The efforts by families, however, continue.

People who are still more desperate have been known to push 14 and 15-year-old children to cross the border between Pakistan and Iran or Pakistan and Afghanistan in hopes that they will make it to the Middle East or to the West. The sale of children as child jockeys which made major news through the 1990s and into the 2000s was, of course, a part of a similar desire to create, in one desperate way or the other, a better life for children who were deemed by their parents to have a very limited future in their own countries. Yes, in many cases these children were sold for cash by parents desperate to feed seven or eight more mouths at home. The hope or the delusional belief that they were accepting money to give their children a better life was widely accepted in a nation that has failed to offer a social security net to its own people.

Given the choice, we do not know how many families would send children overseas if they could do so without any restrictions at all. Preliminary surveys show the number of people who desire this is high, particularly among impoverished groups who know that they can offer their children very little at home. We are then a nation from which children are being pushed away for their sakes. In some cases the families hope that once abroad, their children will be able to earn and send money home so that they could build better lives. In parts of the country, including entire regions in Gujrat, mothers know that sons in particular will travel overseas, notably to Scandinavian countries, as soon as they reach their teens so that they can live with their fathers who migrated there to secure a place for their children in the same country.

Could we then have a situation where fewer and fewer people want their children to remain at home? The question for now is an abstract one. There is not enough data and not enough documentation with regards to the scale and magnitude of the issue.

The hopes and desires of people are at any rate given little significance when policies are made or planning is put in place. But we need to think about the growing trend that we have been seeing over the decades. It continues to increase. Understanding the reasons should be the starting point to creating a situation where families no longer feel compelled to think along such lines or to place children at potential risk by sending them into unsafe situations based on the dream of a life beyond the borders of their own country. Instead, we need to think harder about why so many feel so insecure in their own country. This includes people from all class brackets and while this is strongly linked to income – the poorest of course are more desperate to find a future for children – the issue exists across all social classes.

Minority groups have already disappeared in large numbers, leaving behind a country from which diversity has been stolen. Now, more and more members of majority groups also seem to be considering what would be best for their children and how it can be achieved. This means they are also willing to undergo separation from families with the belief that their decision will ensure their child lives in and grows in a better place and world.

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.

Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com