There are so many of them, children as young as five clinging to edges of the ancient dusty roads that crisscross the Punjab, begging, stealing, offering the flowers that seem to grow in abundance in every corner of the city, home to the Garden of Shalamar. You can see them hawking water or trinkets or massages to strangers for a few rupees. These are Rudyard Kipling’s streets, the “roaring whirl” of Lahore that gave birth to Kipling’s fictional urchin, Kim. But these are real children.

Some are orphans. Others might as well be. In a nation of 144 million where one in every three people lives below the poverty line, many of these children use their meager earnings to feed themselves because their impoverished families cannot.

The statistics are staggering. According to a report released last year by Pakistan’s own human rights commission, nearly half of all children in Pakistan – a stunning 48 percent -- are suffering from malnutrition. In just one area of the Punjab, 1.6 million children were found to be suffering physical or mental defects because there is too little iron in their diets.

An estimated 10,000 children in Pakistan simply run away from home each year, and thousands more are sent to rich countries throughout the Middle East where they are pressed into service in the dangerous trade of camel racing, working for next to nothing as camel jockeys for the amusement of wealthy gamblers, according to the report. And when the day comes that they are too large for the job, they are cast aside.

Despite laws restricting child labor, some 3.3 million children have been forced to work under grim and often dangerous conditions. According to authorities, at least three children died in 2000 due to maltreatment at the hands of their domestic employers, the PHRC alleges that perhaps 100,000 more children are working without pay as bonded laborers -- virtual slaves -- at the kilns that turn clay, the nation’s most natural abundant resource, into bricks. Another 4,000 Pakistani children are languishing among the general population in the country’s desperately overcrowded prisons, dangerous places filled with killers, and cutthroats, foreign drug smugglers and terrorists.

There are no reliable statistics but in its report, the PHRC concluded that, “the physical and sexual abuse of children was believed to be rampant.”

Javed Iqbal posing with police (Dawn)

Perhaps, said Irfan Husain of Dawn, there is a reason for that. “The whole macabre case,” he wrote, not long after Javed’s arrest, “underlines the terrible sexual frustration and perversion that lie just below the surface of our hypocritical society. The abuse of young boys is an unspoken but rampant aspect of everyday life here, and sodomy is the dark – but all too common – side of sexuality here.

“What happened on such a staggering magnitude in Lahore recently occurs daily on a smaller scale elsewhere without editorials being written or inquiry committees being formed.”

In fact, long before Javed delivered his stunning confession to authorities and the press he was caught at least three times sexually abusing young boys. But after each humiliating arrest, he was released. In some cases, he allegedly bribed his way out. In other cases, he didn’t have to. In June of 1998, for example, Javed was arrested after he allegedly paid two boys – part of a family of 16 children fathered by a local fishmonger – for sex. He was immediately released on bail. It wasn’t until his arrest more than a year later for murder that any formal action was taken on the molestation charges. As a result, Pakistani commentators would later complain, Javed’s neighbors tried to shame him into curbing his lust for boys, forcing him to make public apologies. But all that came of it was that he would move to another part of town and to other victims. And in this, Kipling’s city of flowers, there are so many of them, clinging to the edges of these ancient dusty streets, trying to earn a few rupees to feed themselves or their families in a land that would never even notice if they disappeared.