June 12, 2026
By Xari Jalil
LAHORE
By the time Ayesha’s father reached Services Hospital, Lahore, his daughter could no longer speak.
She had managed to record a statement with the police, her voice barely audible. In a video recording, she explained how her employer’s son and driver had sexually assaulted her, not once, but multiple times over several months. She had also revealed how her employer had hushed up the matter while also opting for a back alley abortion to get rid of the pregnancy. “Madam said to me, “Even if my son has done something to you, the child can’t be his.”
A clinic was found; an abortion was performed, but something went wrong afterwards. Two days after her statement, Ayesha was dead. She was just 18.
When Ayesha left her home in Faisalabad, she had been a minor. She came to Lahore the following year to work as a domestic helper in a Model Town household. She had cleaned and cooked, later also surviving the assaults.
The scale of the problem
One in every four households in Pakistan employs a child in domestic work, predominantly girls aged 10 to 14 years, according to the International Labour Organization.
The ILO estimated at least 8.5 million domestic workers in Pakistan, though the real number is likely much higher given the difficulty of accounting for informal labour in the private sphere. These workers are employed informally across middle and upper-middle-class households — largely considered unskilled labour and not guaranteed the same rights and protections as the formal workforce.
Pakistan has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and ILO Conventions on Minimum Age for Employment (No. 138) and Worst Forms of Child Labour (No. 182), and integrated child labour elimination into its National Labour Protection Framework. Yet the gap between treaty obligations and ground reality is vast.
More than 140 cases of abuse, rape and murder of child domestic workers were reported in Pakistani media during a single 10-year period, according to a report compiled by civil society organisations including the Hari Welfare Association and the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER).
The invisible environment
Child labour is dangerous in every form, but domestic work is uniquely so — these children work beyond the reach of any safety protocol or oversight. Left there by their parents, they have no one to turn to when they need help.
Unlike factories or brick kilns, private households are beyond the reach of labour inspectors.
The exploitation of domestic workers goes beyond a lack of workers’ rights — employers often mistreat their domestic workforce. Pakistan’s patriarchal culture, with its rigid social class structure, often prevents them from having a voice.
Children are not legally allowed to work in most businesses in Pakistan, but in the vast majority of the country there’s no law banning them from working inside homes. This legal loophole is where millions of childhoods disappear.
Punjab had pledged to register all domestic workers through its social welfare platform PESSI, but by 2021 had only registered 14,717 workers — a fraction of the millions estimated by the ILO.
A pattern of horror – the case files
Ayesha’s case was just a recent one. There have been several chilling and brutal cases where children as young as seven years old have been subject to such intense cruelty that they have lost their lives.
One of the earliest cases to shock the public conscience surfaced in 2010, when Shazia Masih was murdered by her employer in Lahore.
Twelve-year-old Shazia went to work in 2009 in the home of Chaudhry Naeem, a prominent lawyer and former president of the Lahore Bar Association, where she washed floors and cleaned toilets, earning a meagre amount for the work she did.
According to the medical certificates, the girl died of “cardiopulmonary arrest.” There were reports of “multiple scars” on her back and at least 18 injuries including abrasions on her neck, swelling on her face and a bruise on her forehead, caused, according to the medical report, by “blunt trauma.”
In 2016, 10 year old Tayyaba Bibi’s bruised face was all over social media after she was found at a judge’s home in Islamabad with severe injuries. The couple was convicted and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment — a rare outcome in a system where accountability is the exception.
Not all cases came to light in time. In 2019, Uzma Bibi never got the chance to tell anyone what was being done to her.
The battered body of the 16-year-old Uzma, was found dumped in a canal. Police said she died after blows to the head with a kitchen utensil. She had been working for the family for eight months and earned just Rs 4,000 per month.
One of the most shocking cases was that of eight year old Zohra Shah in 2020, when she was beaten so badly by her employers, that she died of her injuries — for releasing the household’s prized parrots from a cage.
Too many incidents have taken place where children are employed, mistreated, their bodies sent back to their parents broken and tortured, or even lifeless. But the impunity with which these children are employed, even re-employed, is troubling.
Sexual violence – the most buried crime
One of the least reported and most covered up issues is that of sexual assault.
Ayesha’s case is not an anomaly — it is the tip of an iceberg that rarely surfaces because of shame, employer pressure, and the victim’s powerlessness. Ayesha’s own account, as recorded in her complaint, describes how medication to terminate the pregnancy was given to her, after which her condition worsened. She was sent home on leave, where her father discovered the truth — and when he called the employer, he was asked to bring her back to Lahore immediately.
This culture of concealment is widespread, driven by a single objective: avoiding police action. In Ayesha’s case, and many other cases, the issue only comes to light only after the victim has died. There is a “power asymmetry”, where on one side are the impoverished families, and on the other the wealthy employers, and a criminal justice system that routinely favours the latter.
The law and its failures
The key issue with Pakistan’s federal and provincial laws is that they do not meet international standards for the minimum age for work or hazardous work, as they do not extend to all children in the country.
In March 2025, Pakistan ratified three key ILO labour standards, including the Protocol to the Forced Labour Convention — strengthening protections on paper. But paper protections rarely reach the homes where these children work.
Rights campaigners argue that while laws prohibiting child labour exist, their implementation is inconsistent at best, and poverty and lack of access to education continue to push children into domestic work, trapping them in cycles of exploitation. Human rights advocates call for tighter monitoring of households employing underage workers, stronger penalties for abusers, and better rehabilitation services for child victims.
The economics of desperation
According to some, part of the blame lies on the parents who send their children to these homes for work. Child rights activist Iftikhar Mubarik lays responsibility squarely on their shoulders.
“How can we eliminate the parents and their actions from this equation?” he asks. “They are not only breaking the law which clearly states that children cannot work under the age of 14 years – even that is too young according to international conventions – and in fact do not bother checking up on their children. These kids suffer in the homes of their employers, away from the safety of their homes and parents and have no one to ask for help. When they die, these parents become regretful and say they had no choice, but they did. Everyone has a choice.”
Mubarik says while poverty is a serious issue, if someone has children, those children are their responsibility.
“If there are laws like the Child Marriage Restraint Act which holds parents responsible if such a marriage is taking place, then why can they not be held responsible if a child is employed in a home and suffers abuse and torture?” he asks.
But many labour unions interpret the situation as parents who see their children as a way to lift their families out of poverty. Employment agencies openly facilitate the practice. Families queue up, not out of cruelty, but desperation. Poverty, absent schools, and the promise of a “good home” combine to make families complicit in a system that exploits their children.
Meanwhile, Ayesha’s voice haunts those who have heard it. It is one of those rare moments when an invisible worker is briefly seen explaining her trauma. She is gone, but her words remain, a testament to what happens when a country’s laws stop at the front door.