Child sex abuse in Pakistan’s religious schools is endemic

[El Sidd]

Must be cultural

 

[padamchen]

Off course- It a common trend- Its not just Madrasas-It happens in Missionaries and with Swamis as well- When a Human is given power to be the messenger of the belief and we have enough blind followers-Its bound to happen.

That's not the topic here.

Our friend suffers from.a well known affliction called the But paradigm.

He is least bothered about the sexcapades in the madrasas.

Note his first post pays perfunctory lip service and immediately the BUT about Christian missionaries.

If that's not enough in the next post he does away with the inconvenient Muslim baggage altogether and pulls in Mandir daasis.

I'm not known for suffering hypocrites easy. And I call it as I see it.

 

[313ghazi]

Also people need to understand sexual abuse of children is often done by people we trust with our children including family members.

Sadly this is true universally. Do not trust anyone with your kids in a private setting.

 

[PAKISTANFOREVER]

Child sex abuse in Pakistan’s religious schools is endemic

Kathy Gannon, Zarar Khan, Asim Tanvir and Riaz Khan

Yesterday

PAKPATTAN, Pakistan (AP) — Muhimman proudly writes his name slowly, carefully, one letter at a time, grinning broadly as he finishes. He’s just 11 years old and was a good student who had dreams of being a doctor.

School frightens him now. Earlier this year, a cleric at the religious school he faithfully attended in the southern Punjab town of Pakpattan took him into a washroom and tried to rape him. Muhimman’s aunt, Shazia, who wanted only her first name used, said she believes the abuse of young children is endemic in Pakistan’s religious schools. She said she has known the cleric, Moeed Shah, since she was a little girl and describes him as an habitual abuser who used to ask little girls to pull up their shirts.

“He has done wrong with boys and also with two or three girls,” Shazia said, recalling one girl the cleric brutalized so badly he broke her back.

An investigation by The Associated Press found dozens of police reports, known here as First Information Reports, alleging sexual harassment, rape and physical abuse by Islamic clerics teaching in madrassas or religious schools throughout Pakistan, where many of the country’s poorest study. The AP also documented cases of abuse through interviews with law enforcement officials, abuse victims and their parents. The alleged victims who spoke for this story did so with the understanding only their first names would be used.

Pakistani student Muhimman, 11, who was allegedly abused by a cleric, sits with his parents in the south Punjab town of Pakpattan, Pakistan.

There are more than 22,000 registered madrassas in Pakistan, teaching more than 2 million children. But there are many more religious schools that are unregistered. They are typically started by a local cleric in a poor neighborhood, attracting students with a promise of a meal and free lodging. There is no central body of clerics that governs madrassas. Nor is there a central authority that can investigate or respond to allegations of abuse by clerics, unlike the Catholic Church, which has a clear hierarchy topped by the Vatican.

The government of Prime Minister Imran Khan has promised to modernize the curriculum and make the madrassas more accountable, but there is little oversight.

Police say the problem of sexual abuse of children by clerics is pervasive and the scores of police reports they have received are just the tip of the iceberg. Yet despite the dozens of reports, none have resulted in the conviction of a cleric. Religious clerics are a powerful group in Pakistan and they close ranks when allegations of abuse are brought against one of them. They have been able to hide the widespread abuse by accusing victims of blasphemy or defamation of Islam.

Families in Pakistan are often coerced into “forgiving” clerics, said Deputy Police Superintendent Sadiq Baloch, speaking in his office in the country’s northwest, toward the border with Afghanistan.

Overcome by shame and fear that the stigma of being sexually abused will follow a child into adulthood, families choose instead to drop the charges, he said. Most often, when a family forgives the cleric the investigation ends because the charges are dropped.

“It is the hypocrisy of some of these mullahs, who wear the long beard and take on the cloak of piety only to do these horrible acts behind closed doors, while openly they criticize those who are clean shaven, who are liberal and open minded,” Baloch said. “In our society so many of these men, who say they are religious, are involved in these immoral activities.”

‘I WANT THIS MULLAH HANGED’

Police officials say they have no idea how many children are abused by religious clerics in Pakistan. The officials said clerics often target young boys who have not yet reached puberty in part because of the restrictive nature of Pakistan’s still mostly conservative society, where male interaction with girls and women is unacceptable. The clerics for the most part had access to and trust with boys, who are less likely to report a sexual assault.

Eight-year-old Yaous from Pakistan’s remote northern Kohistan region is one of those boys.

Yaous’ father was a poor laborer who had no education and spoke only the local language of his area, yet he wanted to educate his son. He had heard of a religious school in Mansehra, several hundred kilometers (miles) south of his village, where other boys from the area had gone. Too poor to even own a phone, his father went for months without speaking to his son.

Yaous is small for his eight years. His features are slight. In an interview with the AP, with his uncle interpreting, Yaous’ tiny body shivered as he told of his ordeal.

It was near the end of December last year — a holiday at the madrassa. Most of the students had left. Only Yaous and a handful of students had stayed behind. His village was hours away, and the cost of transportation home was too much for his parents.

The other students had gone to wash their clothes and Yaous said he was alone inside the mosque with Qari Shamsuddin, the cleric. The sexual assault was unexpected and brutal. The boy said Shamsuddin grabbed his hand, dragged him into a room and locked the door.

“It was so cold. I didn’t understand why he was taking my warm clothes off,” Yaous said, his voice was barely a whisper.

As Yaous remembered what happened, he buried his head deeper into his jacket. The cleric grabbed a stick, he said. It was small, maybe about 12 inches. The first few sharp slaps stung.

“The pain made me scream and cry, but he wouldn’t stop,” Yaous said. The boy was held prisoner for two days, raped repeatedly until he was so sick the cleric feared he would die and took him to the hospital.

At the hospital, Dr. Faisal Manan Salarzai said Yaous screamed each time he tried to approach him. Yaous was so small and frail looking, Salarzai called him the “baby.”

“The baby was having a lot of bruises on his body — on his head, on his chest, on his legs, so many bruises on other parts of his body,” Salarzai said.

Suspicious, Salarzai ordered Yaous moved to the isolation ward where he examined him, suspecting he had been sexually assaulted. The examination revealed brutal and repetitive assaults.

But Solarzai said Yaous’ uncle refused to believe his nephew was sexually assaulted, instead he said the boy had fallen down. “He said the uncle finally said: ‘If news spreads in our area that he has been sexually assaulted it will be very difficult for him to survive in our area.’”

“He was not willing to talk about it or even think that he was sexually assaulted,” said Solarzai. But the evidence was overwhelming and the doctor contacted the police.

The cleric was arrested and is now in jail. Police have matched his DNA samples to those found on Yaous. But despite the arrest, fellow clerics and worshippers at the Madrassah-e-Taleem-ul-Quran mosque located in a remote region of northwest Pakistan dispute the charges. They say Shamsuddin is innocent, the victim of anti-Islamic elements in the country. The clerics and worshippers also say the accusation is part of a conspiracy to discredit Pakistan’s religious leaders and challenge the supremacy of Islam, a rallying cry often used by right-wing religious clerics seeking to enrage mobs to assert their power.

Yaous’ father, Abdul Qayyum, said he was ashamed he had not spoken to his son in more than three months before the attack happened.

“I want this mullah hanged. Nothing else will do,” Qayyum said.

Mohammad Iqbal talks to her daughter Misbah, center, who was allegedly abused by her religious teacher in Leiyah, Pakistan.

‘FORGIVE ME’

Young boys are not the only victims of sexual abuse by religious clerics. Many young girls like Misbah, who is from a deeply conservative south Punjab village of Basti Qasi, have also been targeted by religious leaders.

Her father, Mohammad Iqbal, isn’t exactly sure how old Misbah is. He thinks she is 11 because in rural Pakistan many births are not registered or are registered much later, and it is just a guess when children are born. They share their small cinderblock structures with several goats and an extended family made up it seems of mostly children who play tag and run around the dirt compound. Misbah, who struggled for words, said she was raped in the mosque next door, where she had been studying the Quran for three years.

The assault happened one morning after she stayed behind to sweep the mosque. The other children had been sent home and the cleric, someone she trusted, asked Misbah to help.

“I had just began to clean when he slammed shut the mosque door,” she said in her native Saraiki language. “I didn’t know why and then he suddenly grabbed me and pulled me into a nearby room. I was screaming and shouting and crying. She couldn’t say how long the assault went on. All she could remember was screaming for her father to help her but he wouldn’t stop, he wouldn’t stop, she repeated.

It was her uncle, Mohammed Tanvir, who rescued her. He had been on his way to college but stopped at the mosque to use the washroom. He noticed a pair of child’s shoes outside the door.

“Then I heard screaming from inside, she was screaming for her father,” Tanvir said. He smashed the door down saw his niece sprawled and naked on the floor. “It looked as if she had fainted,” he said. Her blood-stained pants were in a corner. The cleric knelt at his feet.

“‘Forgive me’ he kept saying to me,’” Tanvir recalled. The cleric was arrested but freed on bail.

‘SUCH A BEAST SHOULD NOT NE SPARED’

In the wake of the attempted rape of Muhimman, the young boy who had proudly showed his writing skills, his aunt said there has been a concerted attempt to silence the family.

“The village people say these are our spiritual leaders and the imams of our religious places, and refuse to kick him out,” Shazia said

After the attack on her nephew, she said, the villagers came to their home and pleaded with them to forgive the cleric, Moeed Shah, who had fled the area.

“They all came to our home and they know we are poor and he is an imam and they said we should forgive him but we won’t,” Shazia said. She said her father, Muhimman’s grandfather, refused.

Shah has yet to be arrested, even though the assault was filmed by several village boys who broke down the door to the washroom and frightened Shah away as he tired to rape Muhimman.

Police say they are investigating and a charge has been filed, but Shah is a fugitive. Some of the neighbors near the mosque said police are not searching vigorously for him. They seemed angry but also resigned to the fact that he would not be jailed.

Muhimman’s aunt was inconsolable.

“Such a beast should not be spared at all,” Shazia said.

https://apnews.com/8fe530dc76beb1893b3b52af88cf99dd

You can't trust these guys. Nowadays you don't need to go to religious schools to learn about Islam. There is so much stuff on the internet and so much literature available you can learn everything you wanted to know about Islam all by yourself.

 

[ChennaiDude]

That's not the topic here.

Our friend suffers from.a well known affliction called the But paradigm.

He is least bothered about the sexcapades in the madrasas.

Note his first post pays perfunctory lip service and immediately the BUT about Christian missionaries.

If that's not enough in the next post he dies away with the inconvenient Muslim baggage altogether and pulls in Mandir daasis.

I'm not known for suffering hypocrites easy. And I call it as I see it.

Point taken- I totally understand where you are coming from- But is that not more of a human trait/Desi Trait-

Deflection is the form of not accepting the fault but just sweeping the real issue under the mat!-Thats the root cause of not being able to fix any problems- "Doing the same thin again and again and expecting different results on a different day"

 

[padamchen]

Point taken- I totally understand where you are coming from- But is that not more of a human trait/Desi Trait-

Deflection is the form of not accepting the fault but just sweeping the real issue under the mat!-Thats the root cause of not being able to fix any problems- "Doing the same thin again and again and expecting different results on a different day"

Yup.

But I'm a moohfatt majoosi.

 

[StormBreaker]

The journalists asked the victims for their story, witnesses for their account of what has happen and the police which also said that they found (in one case) the DNA of the culprit on the victim.
How can that not be the real facts and the real story?

YES, I never disagreed that madrassas don’t have such cases, actually, every madrassa has such case. Point is not that, Point is that every now and then, media outlets target ONLY madrassar while they leave out the known cases elsewhere, Rape of ladies by professors, Deans, Bosses.

Rape is a rape, either on ladies or poor kids which is even worse as pedophilia

The purpose of the article is to report the abuse in the religious schools.

If an article would report about corruption in the Pakistani government, would you then also say: 'Corruption happens in Pakistan, but the problem is not related to Pakistan?'
Or something like: 'It happens all around the world' (implying that you do not have to talk or do something about it).

Again, Like i said, Selective reporting, targeting only madrassas make it seem that the news outlets have another agenda apart from reporting genuine issues these madrassas have in the form of rape

How can people from such a class then still become mullahs?

That is the most unfortunate problem of Pakistan that mullahs are more specifically fake mullahs or the mullah mafia raise from such class. Why ? Because such class people lack understanding of world, easily exploitable in the name of religion, These fake mullahs in their own areas are nothing less than gangsters, they declare someone as munafiq and the whole area gangs up on that poor soul.

Are you saying that because homosexuality is common, then pedophilia is not a problem?
You do know that homosexuality and pedophilia are not the same?

Yes, Latter is the worst act of mankind, Both are shitty acts, Pedophilia is unforgivable act.

Again, these people become mullahs. These are the people that other people listen to for their religious education. Think about that.

Explained to you earlier

Because physical relations between two people that are adults is not the same as physical relations between an adult and a child, since that is pedophilia. It is not the same.

They are not the same, Both are considered worst acts in islam but pedophilia is even worse. Point is, both fall under sexual trespassing category of islam. Other examples are rape

How can I confirm this?
AP News is one of the few media outlets that is willing to write about this.

I don’t trust these media houses, none of them, They do this for money, not with heart. So their loyalties and words lie with the bidders.

It is sad that many members on PDF go in denial mode.
Trying to make it sound that the rape of children is normal or not a real problem.
Trying to defend the mullahs.

Maybe PDF should change its name into MDF: Mullah Defence Forum.

Look, I don’t give a F about mullahs, these fake scums. They have spoilt the society very much, introduced a fake and hybrid artifical version of islam and that has wrecked havoc in the society, Stopped it from progressive scientifically

@jaibi A bit of further clarification from my side as requested by the OP with his right to question me as part of debate.

 

[Mentee]

Yup.

But I'm a moohfatt majoosi.

Pbd no one even mentioned an alphabet about your nearing extinction brand then why all this keernay for?

 

[padamchen]

Pbd no one even mentioned an alphabet about your nearing extinction brand then why all this keernay for?

First educate us about your overpowering need to deflect a Muslim issue to the Church and Temple.

Then let's talk.

 

[Mentee]

I've formed a conclusion that Muslims are not willing to learn their religion let alone teaching it to their kids therefore they are contented with this practice of hiring a cleric to do the rituals as I don't see nay reason why should we follow a judo Christian tradition of having a clergy churning factory like madrassa.

why can't all kids be allowed to attend a normal school and then make their mind after high school whether to go for honors in Islamic studies for profound knowledge of Islam or - - - - - - -

First educate us about your overpowering need to deflect a Muslim issue to the Church and Temple.

Then let's talk.

Pbd

 

[Pakistani Fighter]

Pbd

?

 

[fisher1]

O

Oh thanks for reminding me again,

I have heard genuine cases of girls complaining about how their professors or deans or bosses exploit them by blackmailing for marks or job or salary....

Imagine if someone writes an article saying sexual abuse is a problem in Pakistani colleges and universities, how insincere and full of BS that is. It's not a problem but an exception. You get so many different people, there's bound to be bad eggs.

And you know what, these types of articles are loved by Indians who share them like wildfire and portray Pakistan to have this huge gay and child molesting pedophilia problem. Siasat.pk is very lax about this and it's full of these bakhts stinking up the place with a few videos and articles of these types.

 

[Kailash Kumar]

@StormBreaker

Ok. Thank you for elaborating.

I cannot deny that there are journalists that spread propaganda.

However, I honestly do not think that the journalists from this article are doing that.

Believe it or not, but in the West, people can do awful things, for which they might not be condemned, but when it comes to children, most people will condemn them or go even further.

In my city in the Netherlands, when people know that there is pedophile living somewhere, they go to his house and throw stones through the windows of their house. I am not saying that it is the right thing to do, but I am sure not going to stop them when I would see them do it.

So, I do think that the journalists from this article (3 out of the 4 are Pakistani) really want to make this problem known in order to make the people and politicians aware of the problem, hoping that they will do something about it.

You see, journalists do not only write about madrassas.

For example, do you know about the article in the Boston Globe where they wrote about sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church in Boston?
These were Western journalists writing about a problem among Christians in a Western country.
This article eventually led to many people, who were victims, coming forward to tell their story, not only in Boston, or the United States, but in the whole world and thereby also in the Netherlands.
This also led the Dutch government (and other governments) as well as the Catholic Church to take action regarding this issue.

So, writing these stories might help.
It might initiate action from the people and the government.

And that is what I really think what the journalists were trying to achieve with writing this article.

 

[BL33D]

This is a good question and I think having the opinions of other members you've quoted is important too. I've dealt with the subject professionally so I think I may be biased here. However, regardless, I think this thread will be banned soon enough because of the way users are going to talk here because I don't think that the journalists nor most of the users here actually care about child welfare or protection rather their own feel-good ego trips so the vitriol is going to put an end here even if the original article has been written with malintent. I think this would be best when people see that too and if anyone wants to know why this happens and how you can help here then I'll be happy to respond because I want all children, regardless of their religion, regardless of their ethnicity or age or gender or the colour of their skin to be safe and happy. I would never brutalize a social problem for geopolitics nor as an instrument of hatred against any community.

If this is the thinking and policy on PDF among mods regarding such article posting, I am happy. It brings too much trolling and toxicity than concern and solution.

 

[fisher1]

Because physical relations between two people that are adults is not the same as physical relations between an adult and a child, since that is pedophilia. It is not the same.

Just curious, what are your views on incest? Specifically between daughter and father or mother and son? Two consenting adults. Is it less abhorrent than pedophilia?

And that is what I really think what the journalists were trying to achieve with writing this article.

If the article really wants to help, be a little more specific. Targeting whole of Pakistan sounds like an article written to please stinking Hindus from across the border.

Name the madrassas, i am sure they know if they talked to witnesses and cause their closures.

The article archived nothing but malign Pakistan and madrassas which, believe it or not, are doing a fantastic job. I learnt Holy Quran in one and i am not molested.