Healing the wounds of broken home lad
MULTAN, June 17: The Multan Child Protection Bureau has rehabilitated a boy of a broken home who had developed masochistic tendency if several marks of razor-cut on his body are something to be believed.
In his 13 years of life, Hanif has been through the pangs of domestic violence, sexual abuse, begging for living and drug addiction.
The ordeal of Hanif, not his real name, started when his parents separated 11 years ago. His father, Naseer Ahmed, of Hassanabad on Khanewal Road, is a rickshaw driver. After the separation, his father remarried and so did his mother. Hanif started living with his mother. His stepfather had three children from his previous marriage. In the beginning his mother took care of him but situation changed when she gave birth to another child from her second marriage. She forced him to work as a fruit vendor. Once he started his own business, his mother deemed him independent enough to lead his life on his own and expelled him from the house. At that time, he was just eight years old.
One a winter night, he was shivering in a thin cotton quilt on his cart under the open. Two boys of his age came there and offered him to spend the night with them at a place where they had lit fire near a graveyard. He could not turn down the offer.
Hanif says at the bonfire he saw six other boys. His new friends introduced him to Samad Bond, used as solvent abuse. On that night he sniffed the glue for the first time and after that there was no looking back.
After months, when his mother came to know about Hanif’s addiction to the dirty drug, she brought him back to home. She confined him in the house and beat him to force him to stay clean but Hanif did not give up the addiction. Seeing no sign of change in Hanif, her mother again expelled him from the house.
Hanif again started living with his Samad Bond gang and began begging for living. He spent his days in begging and at nights bought the glue for snuffing.
He had to share his ‘earnings’ with some elder gangsters. Whenever he refused to give them money, they would beat him. The powerful thugs not only extorted money from him but sodomised him at their will.
After sometime the Samad Bond gang developed self-injuring tendency. They would cut their bodies with shaving blades and the boy with more, deeper wounds would earn applause from others. Hanif has a number of blade marks on his neck, chest, arms and legs.
On March 12, 2007, Multan Child Protection and Welfare Bureau officials caught him near the shrine of Shah Rukn-i-Alam when he was begging there.
The bureau treated the boy for a month and then let him go to start a new life.
Again adopted by his mother, now Hanif is working in a factory and getting a Rs3,300 monthly salary. Hanif says he wants to get education and become a respected citizen. His mother is now vigilant and taking care of him. She admits Hanif suffered a lot of ordeals because of her negligence. Her message for other parents is that they should feel their responsibilities towards their children.
Source: Dawn
Date:6/19/2007
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