LAHORE - The Child Rights Movement (CRM) Punjab – a collation of civil society organisations on Tuesday staged demonstration in front of Press Club Lahore against child domestic labour and the death of two housemaids in one week in Punjab.
CRM activists said that on January 02 and 05, deaths of 10 year old Erum Ramzan and 16 year old Azra respectively by their employers was a stark reminder to society and the government of Punjab who have continuously ignored unending brutal and merciless murders of child domestic workers in Punjab.
The CMR said that since January 2010 no employer had admitted the crime including one of the latest cases of Azra but Erum’s case is first of its kind in which the employer has confessed of torturing the child which resulted her death. CRM member Iftikhar Mubarak said that the media and other different organisations have reported more cases of torture and death of child domestic workers in 2013.
“The year 2013 proved very lethal for children despite the last government had declaring it the year of child rights. 21 cases, including 8 deaths of CDWs were reported. All of the cases in 2013 were reported from Punjab province only; except two, all were girls”, he said. While chanting slogans against the incidents, the CRM activists demanded the government to impose immediate ban on domestic child labor to avoid such incidents.
10 year old Eram belonged to village in Okara, she was found dead in the house of Altaf Mehmood in Askari 9 Lahore. Altaf Mehmood’s wife confessed that she tortured the little girl and locked her in the servant quarter after Rs 30,000 had gone missing from the house. Eram was taken to the hospital upon being found in the room unconscious where the doctors pronounced her as dead. The woman had confessed her crime to the police upon she and her husband and her son were taken under custody.
A couple days later, Azra’s case surfaced. Her employers in Faisal Town claimed that Azra, 16, committed suicide while the parents of the deceased claim that the she was raped and then strangled to death. She too came from a poor background from a village in Punjab.
Meanwhile, police have arrested a man allegedly for assaulting a 10-year-old boy at a religious school in the North Cantonment Area.
A resident of Altaf Park told the police that Ashfaq assaulted his ten-year-old son at the seminary. The police have arrested the man and criminal case has also been registered against him.