Camel Kids and the Trade in Women: Pakistan’s Hidden Trafficking Crisis

Some crimes documented in Pakistan’s recent past never generated the domestic headlines their scale deserved, because the harm happened almost entirely outside the country’s own borders, to people with no way to be heard once they’d left it.

Camel Kids

Through the 1990s, as the wealthy Gulf states grew richer, camel racing grew into a serious industry there – and alongside it grew a genuinely inhuman practice. Very young children, some kidnapped, some purchased outright, were brought from South Asia and tied to the backs of racing camels, their light weight prized as a competitive advantage. Terrified, the children would scream as the race began – and the camel, hearing the cries, would run faster still. Some children died of sheer fright in the saddle. Others fell and were trampled by the camels running behind them.

In Pakistan, organized groups ran this trade, kidnapping poor children specifically to sell into it. In other documented cases, parents driven by poverty sold their own children to the same networks. Police made no effective move against the trade, and successive governments gave it little serious attention – a pattern that continued for years, with children trafficked into the practice not only from Pakistan but from Bangladesh, Sudan, and Mauritania as well, until the case was carried, almost single-handedly at first, by the Karachi-based rights activist Ansar Burney, who spent years pressing Gulf governments and international bodies to act and personally helped track down and bring home Pakistani children who had disappeared into the trade. That pressure eventually converged with campaigns by international anti-slavery groups, and in 2005 the United Arab Emirates issued a federal law banning the use of jockeys under eighteen, paired with a $2.7 million agreement with UNICEF to fund the rehabilitation, repatriation, and reintegration of the children already working the tracks. By the UAE’s own estimate there were some 3,000 child camel jockeys on Gulf farms when the ban took effect; by the time the first phase of repatriation closed in March 2006, UNICEF reported that 1,075 of them had been sent home. Human jockeys on Gulf racetracks have since been replaced almost entirely by mechanical ones – lightweight robot jockeys, remote-controlled from the sidelines, that took over the very role the trafficked children had been kidnapped to fill.

A Trade in Women

A parallel trade operated in several South Asian countries, Pakistan included, alongside Sri Lanka, India, and the Philippines: women bought and transported to the Middle East to be sold. Once a woman left the country through this pipeline, in the accounts documented at the time, there was frequently no way to trace what happened to her afterward – no confirmation of where she ended up, how she was treated, or even, in some cases, whether she was still alive.

What connects both practices is the same structural failure: victims moved across a border into a jurisdiction where no one at home had the standing, the information, or the political will to follow them. A kidnapped child strapped to a camel in the Gulf and a trafficked woman sold into an unknown situation abroad were, in the accounting of the time, effectively erased from Pakistan’s own crime statistics the moment they left its territory – not because the crime against them had ended, but because it had simply moved somewhere no one at home was tracking it. It took an outside advocate willing to work the Gulf side of the border, rather than the Pakistani side alone, to make even the camel jockey chapter of this story visible enough to end.