n 2019, the Rawalpindi police arrested Sohail Ayaz, following a complaint by a citizen in the metropolis. However, they were not prepared for what they would find during the investigation. The amount of material on Ayaz’s laptop, depicting child pornography, was shocking.

The Rawalpindi cybercrime division took over the case and the revelations prompted a response that reached the top management in Islamabad. They were alerted to the issue of online child abuse and the need for specific measures to prevent it.

“This was the first case of its kind in Pakistan,” says a senior police official who was among those who raided Ayaz’s residence in Rawalpindi. “The depravity we discovered in his records was beyond comprehension.”

Ayaz, 45, was a chartered accountant and an expert in traversing the dark web. He lived in Nilour, Islamabad, and had maintained a second residence in Rawalpindi. He also worked as a consultant for the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Ayaz had a history of criminal activity, including sexual assault on minors in the UK. For that he had served a jail sentence and was deported. He was also deported from Italy for being part of a Romanian child pornography ring. According to a cybercrime expert in Islamabad, who refused to be identified, Ayaz had not been on their radar as inter-departmental record sharing across the country was not standard practice.

According to official data, Pakistan is witnessing continuous, if silent, rise in online child sexual abuse. The country ranks third in international cyber complaints.

According to the FIA data, the age of children subjected to sexual abuse ranges from as young as nine to 13 years. Some of the victims are from abroad. The age of the offenders is between 18 and 30 years. Over the past five years, the FIA, the primary agency responsible for addressing the issue in Pakistan, has recorded more than two million cases of child exploitation imagery uploaded onto the internet. However, the number of reported complaints in the past four years is only 403.

The cybercrime wing of the FIA is responsible for investigating cases of online child abuse. Since 2018, only 124 individuals have been arrested and incarcerated. Only 105 cases have been registered against those involved in the crime.

The FIA has established 15 cells in major cities across the country to address this issue. Rawalpindi and Islamabad have received 39 and 141 complaints, respectively, followed by 38 in Sukkur and 50 in Gujranwala. Most major cities have a relatively high number of complaints, which the investigating officials attribute to a lack of awareness and the need for remedial measures.

Data shows that the number of cases is increasing rapidly. In 2018, only one complaint was received from a guardian; 19 complaints were then received in 2019, 83 in 2020, 113 in 2021 and 187 in 2022. According to FIA Cyber Crimes Additional Director Operations Tariq Parvez, “If every related complaint had been registered, the number would have been much higher.”

Speaking at an event in Karachi in July, FIA’s Director General Mohammed Tahir Raisaid that “our nation is not reporting these incidents to the law enforcement agencies or to Meta. This is why only 343 such cases have been reported in the last five years.” The number has since surpassed 400.

The abuse in Pakistan

Citing the sensitivity of the matter, several FIA officials The News on Sunday talked to declined comment on record. A cybercrime official in Islamabad stated that social media platforms, including WhatsApp, have facilitated communication and collaboration among child offenders, thus creating a network. This is a cause for concern for the FIA, as data provided by international organisations shows a bleak picture of Pakistan. The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, a non-profit organisation based in the United States, manages such data and provides Tipline Reports to the countries where the content is posted. When a tip regarding a crime is reported to law enforcement agencies, it is considered approved for action and is referred to as a Tipline report.

The FIA has recorded more than two million cases of child exploitation imagery uploaded onto the internet in 2021 alone. However, the number of reported complaints in four years is only 403.

The data from NCMEC has shown a steady increase, with 16.9 million reports in 2019; 21.7 million in 2020; and 29.3 million in 2021. This increase has made Pakistan the country ranked third on the international list of Tipline Reports in 2021. In 2019, there were 1.1 million Tipline Reports about Pakistan, placing the country second to India. The number increased to 1.2 million in 2020, with Pakistan ranking third after India and the Philippines. The number doubled to 2.1 million in 2021, keeping Pakistan in the third place on the list.

Painful tales

Requesting anonymity, an FIA-Islamabad officer reported that a 16-year-old boy from Islamabad had befriended a person claiming to be a girl on Facebook. They exchanged pictures and videos through the social media platform. However, the person behind the fake profile later threatened to share the pictures with his brother if he failed to pay Rs 1 million. The boy complied and was also exploited sexually. He eventually told his family and the FIA about it, but by then the culprit had deleted the accounts through which he had been communicating with and could not be traced.

Societal shame

Creating awareness about child sexual abuse is a major challenge. The FIA considers the social taboo surrounding the problem one of the biggest obstacles in controlling it. According to one of the investigating officers, many parents withdraw their complaints or stop cooperating once the case reaches the court on account of the stigma attached to being the guardians of an abused child. A senior officer from the Punjab said the cybercrime unit had little time to raise awareness about child abuse. Despite the need for awareness, he said, few schools or government officials approached the FIA for help.

The FIA straightjacket

Social media applications like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat and Gmail are widely used for sharing videos in Pakistan. However, except for WeTransfer, all these platforms are based in the United States and there is no mutual legal assistance agreement between the two countries. According to an FIA investigator, the lack of an MLA agreement with the US causes catastrophic delays in obtaining internet protocol details of the offenders. The officer says they used to receive details about predators on compact discs, but are now getting them through online communication. He says an MLA agreement with key countries like the US, could make it easier to trace the culprits timely. Another issue, he says, is that Gmail, deletes any material related to child abuse and blocks the related IDs, without reporting the details to Interpol or the NCMEC. As a result, the evidence against predators is lost.

Legal lacunae

The FIA is also struggling on the legal front. Officers says the courts have difficulty reining in the offenders. Some of them, tried under PECA, get bail because the punishment under these sections is less than 10 years in prison. The FIA wants the punishment raised more than 10 years to make it an offence where bail is not granted. In January 2022, Mohis Akhtar Kayani, a senior judge of the Islamabad High Court, ordered the federal government to amend the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 (PECA) to enhance the punishment for child pornography from 7 years in jail to 20. Kayani compared the laws in various countries and observed that “the sentence provided in special law is not in conformity with the heinousness of the crime against the children.” However, the parliament has yet to implement the recommendation.

Redefining the term

In November 2022, the FIA renamed the cybercrime cell that looks into these cases. The new name, Unit to Counter Online Child Abuse (UCOCA), does away with the term ‘child pornography’ which is globally discouraged due to the stigma attached to it. Similarly, the term child grooming is not included in the PECA. A 2017 report by International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) notes that Pakistan has not criminalised online grooming. The FIA wants to include the words “child pornography” in Section 22 of PECA, because they want child pornography be distinguished from pornography in general. Interpol, however, suggests that the term “child pornography” be replaced with “child sexual abuse.”

The writer is an  Islamabad-based broadcast journalist