In the past six months, 680 children from all across Punjab and 330 alone from Lahore have gone missing. Despite highlighting the serious issue on media, authorities have failed to break the network of kidnappers and poor segments of society are on their own to protest their children. In recent times, an alarming increase of kidnapping cases of children has been witnessed. Parents are protesting in various areas to raise the question regarding law and order condition of the city.
It has been reported that usually children from most vulnerable families of society are the prime victims. There are some assumptions that some children just runaway from homes due to the poverty and in some cases due to the harsh behaviour of parents. But there is dire need to investigate the issue at grassroots level comprehensively in order to find the causes.
Constant rising number of missing children reflects that there is strong active mafia involved in abducting children and perhaps selling them into forced labour or selling their organs. It is disappointing that law enforcement officials have unable to devise any strategy to arrest the abductors. Usually after the sad incident parents are asked to file report but later hardly any action taken by the officials and blame game starts. In most of the cases authorities brush aside their responsibility to provide security by saying most of these are runaway cases and problem does not lie with law enforcement agencies.
In such a scenario, parents must remain vigilant and must not let their children go out from home alone.
Insufficient action on part of officials to curb dilemma of missing children is quite disturbing.