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 before international pressure and, eventually, formal bans on child camel jockeys in the UAE and neighboring states in the mid-2000s finally forced the practice into decline.
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.
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