The recent heinous incident of murder and torture of children in Lahore’s Defence Housing Authority (DHA) residences highlights the existence of violence in our society. An eleven-year-old household worker was allegedly murdered and his younger five-year-old brother was injured by the employers over the mistake of eating food from the refrigerator.
This is not the first case of child labour and torture that led to the death of the child, but there had been a number of incidents reported in the recent past across the country, but the government, despite legislation and the presence of the law, fails to take appropriate action and stop such incidents of violence.
Murder and torture were not the only revolting crimes in this situation; employing child labour is an exploitative gruesome practice that, due to the helplessness of the children, facilitates such situations of extreme violence.
However, apart from bringing forth justice as soon as possible for the victims, the government must also reflect on why such a situation was allowed to occur in the first place. It is not like laws have not been put into place to curtail child labour, especially criminalising the employment of child domestic workers.
In the past, there had been efforts to bring domestic work into the realm of proper employment, yet those efforts have mostly fizzled out due to strong cultural and commercial barriers which incentivise child labour. However, that changed with Punjab’s Domestic Workers Act 2019, which criminalises the employment of children under the age of 15 as domestic help and states that the domestic workforce shall not work over the mandatory eight hours a day. The Act makes necessary a letter of employment, which has to be approved by the Inspector having jurisdiction in the area.
It is quite clear that this law is not being implemented, as the employment of child domestic workers appears to be a practice so embedded in certain parts of the country that no effort is made to even hide it. The government needs to enforce the implementation of this law and expand it so that no employment can occur without a contract. Moreover, it is time to expand the definition of a “workman” under labour laws so that domestic workers can be privy to the privileges afforded to labourers by the labour courts.
