The NCRC recorded 17,348 registered cases of child abuse and sexual offences between January 1 and December 31, 2025. One case can involve more than one allegation, so the count isn’t quite the same as counting individual children, but the scale is unmistakable. It works out to nearly 48 registered cases every single day.
Punjab accounted for 12,800 of them, or 74 per cent. Sindh followed with 3,187, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with 855, Islamabad Capital Territory with 431, and Balochistan with 75.
Who the victims are
Girls made up 65 per cent of victims and boys 35 per cent. Children between 11 and 17 accounted for 86 per cent of cases, and another 2,378 cases involved children aged ten or younger. Younger than ten. It’s worth letting that sink in for a second.
The biggest single category might surprise you, too. It wasn’t what many people would assume, but abduction or forcible taking away of children for forced marriage or sexual exploitation, with 8,205 cases. Separately, the commission recorded 5,024 charges under provisions relating to rape and sexual abuse of children during the year.
Reading the provincial gap carefully
It’s tempting to glance at that table and decide Balochistan is the safest place for a child while Punjab is the most dangerous. That reading is almost certainly wrong. These are registered cases, so they tell us how many families managed to reach the system, not how many children were harmed. Punjab’s size and its denser reporting machinery push its share up. Distance, stigma and thin police presence elsewhere can quietly push others down.
NCRC chairperson Ayesha Raza Farooq made a related point earlier this year, arguing that rising reported numbers reflect growing public trust in law enforcement. There’s something to that. But trust only counts for something if the system actually earns it.
Reporting is not the same as justice
This is where the story gets uncomfortable. The NCRC’s report cites Punjab Police data showing 33,449 FIRs relating to child-rights violations and child sexual abuse in 2025, with 4,727 convictions, roughly 14 per cent. It also says comparable numbers from the other provinces weren’t available. Those figures cover a broader category than the 17,348 above, so it wouldn’t be fair to set them side by side too neatly, but the direction is clear enough.
The Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights took up the issue this month. Chairperson Senator Samina Mumtaz Zehri put it bluntly: the problem in Pakistan isn’t a shortage of laws, it’s the writ of the police and the courts. And she has a point. On paper, the legal framework is fairly solid. What’s missing is a system that reliably carries a case from complaint to verdict.
Media monitoring points the same way. The child protection organisation Sahil counted 3,630 press-reported cases in 2025, up 8 per cent on 2024. That’s more than nine a day, from newspapers alone.
What the commission wants done
The NCRC’s recommendations are practical rather than dramatic. It wants District Child Protection Units in every district, properly staffed with trained case managers. It wants a provincial Survivor Support Fund to cover medical, legal and counselling costs, and strict protection of children’s identities and digital data during investigations, trials and media coverage. It has also proposed Child Protection Committees at hospitals, so that a survivor can get medical, forensic, legal and psychological help under one roof instead of being sent from office to office.
That point about identity deserves a word for those of us in the press. Whenever a case turns into a national scandal, a child’s name, school or neighbourhood risks ending up on every screen. Reporting carefully isn’t a courtesy. It’s part of protecting the survivor.
Where this leaves us
Numbers like these usually follow a familiar script: outrage for a few days, a few promises, then silence. What the data suggests, though, is that awareness isn’t the missing piece. Follow-through is. Trained investigators, forensic labs that actually work, courts that finish what they start, and support that reaches a family before they give up on the whole process.
In the meantime, there’s something ordinary people can do. Make sure the children in your life know they can tell a trusted adult anything that scares or confuses them, and believe them when they do. Anyone who suspects a child is at risk can reach the Madadgar helpline at 1098.
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