The scale of child trafficking in Pakistan is staggering. According to the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report 2025, Pakistani authorities investigated 2,688 suspects and secured 805 convictions for trafficking offences between April 2023 and October 2024. In the same period, the Pakistan Railway Police rescued 684 children from trains, preventing them from vanishing into networks of exploitation.

UNICEF estimates that 3.3 million children are trapped in labour nationwide, many of them trafficked into hazardous work. Yet only 34 to 42 per cent of children under five are registered at birth, leaving millions invisible to the state. This invisibility is the trafficker’s greatest weapon, allowing children to be moved, exploited, and erased without a record.

Trafficking in Pakistan is often described as rural to urban, but evidence shows it thrives most in congested urban and peri-urban hubs. Refugee settlements, slums, and camps for internally displaced persons are epicentres of vulnerability. UNICEF Innocenti’s 2025 study on displaced children confirms that Afghan migrants and IDPs in Pakistan face heightened risks of trafficking, forced labour, and child marriage, particularly in urban and peri-urban areas.

Overcrowding makes children invisible, hidden in plain sight, and easier to move without notice. While rural poverty feeds the supply, it is the anonymity of cities that sustains the trade.

The routes of trafficking are both internal and external, and their complexity goes far beyond kilns and workshops. Within Pakistan, children are trafficked into forced begging rings, bonded labour, and domestic servitude. Gangs increasingly operate under the guise of manpower agencies, placing girls into households where exploitation is concealed behind closed doors. Others are pushed into sex work, either locally or through networks that extend abroad.

Across borders, porous frontiers with Afghanistan and Iran allow smugglers to move children into neighbouring countries, while Gulf states remain destinations for domestic servitude and sexual exploitation. Boys have historically been trafficked to serve as camel jockeys, and while this practice has declined, cases still surface. More troubling today are reports of boys trafficked into drug peddling networks or recruited by anti-state militant outfits, particularly in border regions.

The purpose is always exploitation: boys forced into begging, bonded labour, or criminal networks; girls trafficked into domestic servitude, marriages, or brothels. These journeys are not migrations but chains, binding children to lives they never chose.

These routes are organised, deliberate, and sustained by demand. Pakistan’s trafficking in persons is not a hidden crime but a transnational operation, linking local gangs, labour brokers, and international networks in a chain of abuse that treats children as commodities.

Birth registration is the foundation upon which all other child protection measures rest, and without it, the fight against trafficking will always be undermined

Birth registration is the foundation upon which all other child protection measures rest, and without it, the fight against trafficking will always be undermined

Institutional caveats deepen the crisis. Despite thousands of investigations, convictions remain disproportionately low. Police officers often lack training to recognise trafficking indicators, mistaking forged documents or repeated movement of minors as routine.

Breaking this cycle requires more than new units or announcements. Pakistan has adopted a National Action Plan and created specialised wings within the Federal Investigation Agency and the National Police Bureau’s Counter Organised Crime Monitoring Unit. These initiatives, supported by UNODC, are steps forward. Yet they remain fragmented. What is needed is the unification of these sporadic Trafficking in Persons mechanisms into a single, dedicated inter-agency system.

A unified mechanism would require a centralised legislative mandate to make all agencies collaborate instead of operating within departmental silos. National and provincial frameworks must bind police, FIA, provincial child protection bureaus, border security forces, and social welfare agencies into one structure. To ensure embedding accountability into the system, a parliamentary oversight body should discharge the role of the highest public representation, preventing the mechanism from becoming another symbolic body.

Coordination must be institutionalised, not left to chance. A stronger inter-agency case management system should embed clear steps across law enforcement agencies, with responsibilities and timelines set in advance. Early detection and urgent inter-agency response must be mandated to all institutions.

For example, when an adult is seen moving with a group of children, every police officer, railway guard, or border official should be trained and required to suspect trafficking and act immediately. Specialised training must focus on how to sense and respond to these indicators, ensuring prevention and rescue are treated as shared duties across institutions rather than siloed responsibilities. Prevention is far more urgent than waiting for rescue or mourning after the fact.

Resource allocation and capacity building are equally critical. Existing initiatives often rely on donor support and short-term projects. To be effective, Pakistan must allocate sustained resources to anti-trafficking units, fund shelters adequately, and embed training curricula into police academies and border security institutions. Building institutional memory and capacity ensures that anti-trafficking efforts do not fade once external funding ends.

Strengthening victim referral systems must therefore be part of a continuum that begins with prevention and detection. Rehabilitation should be embedded into the justice process, ensuring that rescued children are not returned to the same exploitative environments.

Communities must be engaged as partners, encouraged to monitor and report suspicious movements, and supported with awareness campaigns that expose trafficking for what it truly is: an organised exploitation. Reintegration must be treated not as charity but as justice, ensuring children regain dignity and protection rather than slipping back into invisibility.

Above all, universal birth registration must be prioritised. Without identity, children remain invisible to the state, unprotected by law, and easy prey for traffickers. Registration is not a bureaucratic formality but the first line of defence against trafficking. To make this possible, awareness campaigns must reach parents and communities, especially mothers, who are often the first guardians of a child’s rights.

Community elders, tribal leaders, and local representatives should be mandated to enhance birth registration, turning registration into a shared responsibility rather than an isolated act.

The government must design and roll out special mobile birth registration camps to reach communities on the move, such as economically motivated migrants, nomadic groups, seasonal labourers, and internally displaced persons. These mobile units can ensure that children born in transit or in temporary settlements are not left unattended.

Registration campaigns should also extend to refugee camps. Refugee children may not be granted citizenship for political reasons, but it remains a fundamental right that every child be counted. Birth registration, not census surveys or temporary assessments, is the correct way to secure this right.

Until every child is registered, prevention and protection will remain incomplete. Birth registration is the foundation upon which all other child protection measures rest, and without it, the fight against trafficking will always be undermined.

The image of a trafficked child is not a metaphor but a reality. To confront trafficking is to confront a social contract that normalises exploitation and silences outrage. Yet our collective response has been one of short-lived sighs; a momentary sob when a case makes headlines, followed by silence that allows the issue to remain pervasive.

The missing children of Pakistan are not lost; they are taken. And until society demands their return with sustained uproar rather than fleeting grief, they will remain shadows in the nation’s conscience.

© The Friday Times