Child Sex Abuse and Blackmail: The Horrible Scandal Rocking a Pakistani Village

More than 280 children forced into sex acts, producing more than 400 videos of child pornography: This is the scale of a horrible tale of abuse and blackmail that is rocking Pakistan. According to Pakistani media reports, children in the village of Hussain Khan Wala, near the Indian border, were raped and molested on camera, and then the tapes were used to blackmail them and their families.

“They made the video of my son in 2011. We have been paying money to the blackmailers for the last four years. I have seen the videos. It was disgusting and shameful,” the mother of a 14-year-old victim told the Nation. “We are seriously thinking to set our houses on fire and leave the locality.”

According to the Nation, the abuse in Hussain Khan Wala began in 2006 and ended last year. The victims include children as young as six. Some victims were reportedly forced to rape one another on camera. The resulting tapes were then sold, including to porn site operators in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in Europe, one villager told the Nation. A Pakistani child welfare official called the scheme “the largest-ever child abuse scandal in Pakistan’s history.”

While police have arrested seven men in connection with the allegations, villagers say that police were complicit in the abuse. The mother of one victim, who spoke to Reuters, said that when she approached local police the “clerk told me to get lost, and I was thrown out.”

“I went to the police station to file a complaint, but instead of registering a [report], they took my son into custody,” the mother of another victim told the wire service. She said her 15-year-old son is still being detained.

In an indication both of the scale of the abuse and the extent of the blackmail scheme, the Guardian reported that villagers of Hussain Khan Wala, home to about 5,000 people, have copies of some of the videos that were made on their cellphones and are showing them to reporters who are now arriving there.

The descriptions of videos that have in recent days filtered out from Hussain Khan Wala paint a horrifying picture of violence and extortion, with children forced at gunpoint to participate in sex acts. One 18-year-old man, who told Reuters he had been abused since age 10, said he stole money and jewelry from his family and gave them to the attackers after being blackmailed with videos of his sexual abuse.

“I was going to school one day when these boys picked me up and beat me up badly. Then they drugged me, and when I woke up, they showed me these videos they had made of me,” said the man, who was not identified by name. “They told me that they would bury me alive if I told anyone … I thought about killing myself every single day.”

For their part, police are now claiming that the numbers of victims are being exaggerated. “Despite several announcements only eight complainants came forward,” Shehzad Sultan, a regional police officer, told the Express Tribune. “Had there been 280 cases, there would have been a deluge of complainants.”

Activists argue there’s a good reason for the relative silence.  “I have personally met hundreds of parents who have not yet come forward to file official complaints, either out of fear or shame,” Latif Sra, a lawyer for some of the victims, told Reuters.

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