Ending Child Trafficking In Pakistan Through Birth Registration |
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........