An investigation
No. 01
They cooked, they cleaned, they raised other people's children. For years, they lived in houses that were not theirs. This is an ongoing record of what happened to them — and of the country that let it happen.
By Project Tahafuz · Filed from Lahore
Case file
Verified Record
Zara, 15
"I always knew it was somewhere close. I just didn't know how to get there."
Her story →By the numbers
264,000
Estimated children in domestic work across Pakistan
12
Median age at first placement, in our fieldwork sample
6
Girls whose stories are documented in this record
0
Federal criminal offences specific to child domestic servitude
Sana, 15 · Murree Ka · placed in Faisalabad
Sana's story does not hold together in a straight line. Dates shift. Sequences blur. She says things that contradict what she said ten minutes ago. Her father told her she brought this on herself. Her employers told her she was confused. At some point, a person who is told enough times that her version of events is wrong stops being sure what the right version is.
Continue →Dispatch · From the case files
"Inho na kuch kiya hi nahi." They did nothing. She said it the way you say something you have already made peace with, even though it is not okay.
Hira, 16 · Placed in Cantt, Lahore · mother has not been found
Hira is sixteen and she is shy in the specific way of someone who spent years being made invisible and has not yet fully remembered that she does not have to be. When something strikes her as funny — and things do, she has a dry quick sense of humour — she laughs and immediately covers her mouth with her hand, as if the laugh needs permission.
Continue →0
federal criminal offences specific to child domestic servitude in Pakistan.
₨50k
maximum fine under the Punjab Restriction on Employment of Children Act 2016.
Read the statutes →Maryam, 18 · Placed in Wapda Town, Lahore
Maryam is eighteen. She covers her face with her hand when she talks to strangers. In our interview, she said very little — and some of what she said was not accurate. Not because she is dishonest. Because she has spent six years in a system that did not change anything for her, and at some point the words stopped mattering enough to get right.
Continue →
Rizwana, 15
She is quick to laugh, quick to push into a conversation, quick to make a point before you have finished asking. There is a lot of life in her and it is not performance. It is something she held onto through seven months of systematic torture in the home of a civil judge, through two years of delayed surgeries, through girls in the hostel who mock how she looks.
Continue →Cartography · Interactive
Hover the pulses
Live map · OpenStreetMap base, pins placed from the case files
Where they came from
Each red pin is a real place in Punjab. One end of the dashed line is the town a girl was taken from. The other is the house where she was made to work — often a full day's drive from anyone who knew her name. Hover a name below to trace her route.
Six red pulses across the province. Each one a girl the state recovered — after someone else had already broken her.
Letters · Live from the wall
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