PUBLISHED
August 31, 2025
KARACHI:
Last month, a 12-year-old madrasah student in Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), died after what police and prosecutors allege was hours of torture by his teachers for missing class. Within days, eleven staff from the unregistered seminary were arrested; a Khwazakhela magistrate granted police custody. A parallel case emerged from Swabi where a cleric was detained for torturing a six-year-old for not memorising his lesson.
The Swat boy’s father says teachers called later to claim the child had fallen in the toilet, but a FIR now cites sections 302 and 34 of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC), and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Child Protection Act.
The Swat case is not something new; it is the latest in a long list across public schools, private institutions, and madressahhs of children beaten, humiliated, and sometimes killed on the pretext of discipline. Six years earlier, Lahore mourned 17-year-old Hunain Bilal, who classmates say was punched, dragged, and had his head slammed against a wall for failing to memorise a lesson; he died the same day.
Despite high-profile pledges, “maar nahin, pyar” [not beating, but love] has been a slogan for years. The law remains a loophole of partial prohibitions, court orders, and administrative circulars. That patchwork, educators, lawyers, and child-rights groups say, is exactly what many institutions exploit.
At the federal level, a landmark development arrived in 2020 when the Islamabad High Court suspended Section 89 of the PPC, a clause that shields those who inflict harm on children in good faith for their benefit.
The order applied inside the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT). A year later, Parliament passed the ICT Prohibition of Corporal Punishment Act, banning all forms of corporal punishment in formal and non-formal educational institutions, seminaries, childcare institutions, and juvenile rehabilitation centres in the capital.
The Sindh Prohibition of Corporal Punishment Act, passed in 2016 and effectively operational after rules were adopted in 2021, prohibits corporal punishment across educational and care settings. “No matter the rules or laws, the line blurs almost in every sector many child-rights associations note that, outside explicit bans, Section 89 still operates as a legal defence,” says Shehla Ikram, a retired government school teacher and educationist.
Ikram also mentioned that Punjab has long promoted the slogan maar nahin, pyar and issued departmental directives banning corporal punishment in government and partner schools; so has KP. “What we see today is still far away from what is there on paper,” she points out. “We need a comprehensive statutory prohibition across all settings. Gaps remain in enforcement and coverage, especially for private schools and madressahhs.”
International and local authorities continue to characterise Pakistan’s framework, which is legally in place in ICT and Sindh, but with other provinces relying on a mix of sector regulations, circulars, and child-protection provisions that do not always amount to a ban.
Loopholes and exploitation
Where Section 89 hasn’t been neutralised by statute or court order, defence counsel can argue that physical disciplining was “for the child’s benefit,” making serious charges harder to sustain, especially if families accept a compromise. Child-rights lawyers have flagged the Section for decades; Islamabad’s suspension in 2020 cut off that defence in ICT, but the rest of the country still tangles with it in practice.
In Punjab and KP, circulars and education department directives ban corporal punishment. But private-school operators and seminary administrators sometimes treat those as policy rather than law, calibrating compliance to the likelihood of inspections and penalties. The Pakistan Education Foundation’s circular to partner schools, for instance, spells out a “complete ban,” but it proved only as strong as its monitoring.
In March 2024, after a 10-year-old girl was allegedly beaten with sticks at a government primary school in Arifwala, photos went viral, police registered a case, and then the family publicly forgave the teacher. Police acknowledged they acted because the images spread online. Such “compromises,” often filmed and disseminated, blunt deterrence and reinforce the message that abuse can be negotiated away. “Those days are over when parents used to appreciate punishment by teachers or it was believed that such practices help children in being a better human,” shares Mehreen Zehra, child psychologist. “On the contrary we have seen severe cases of mental health issues in such children.”
While ICT and Sindh laws cover seminaries, the country lacks a unified regulatory framework for madressahs nationwide. Affiliating boards may have codes of conduct, but enforcement is uneven, and thousands of seminaries remain unregistered. As the Swat case highlights, an unregistered setting multiplies risks and diffuses accountability.
“In recent years, corporal punishment stories in Pakistan have routinely broken through because of video, and these leave an impact on even the children who are beaten at their homes by their parents,” Zehra explains, adding that, a child aging between 8-10 years old came to her and mentioned that he had a clip of a teacher thrashing children in a Peshawar school in 2023, and another 2024 video from Faisalabad in which a madressahh teacher beats a student. He had also seen recurring clips from Karachi and elsewhere and told the therapist that he fears he will be on a viral video someday.
In many instances, FIRs follow only after footage circulates on WhatsApp and TikTok. Local authorities sometimes react to the viral footage rather than to the harm. And there is rarely sustained follow-through without strong legal outcomes and institutional accountability.
National counts of corporal punishment incidents are alarmingly low. It is another gap that institutions exploit. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, in its State of Human Rights 2023 report, collated media monitoring that tallied dozens of documented cases; a widely cited synthesis puts the number at 66–79 for that year alone, recognising that media-visible cases are the tip of the iceberg. The National Commission on the Rights of the Child (NCRC) has warned in successive reports that violence such as including corporal punishment, remains entrenched across home, school, and online spaces.
International trackers such as End Corporal Punishment concur that Pakistan has made significant strides in ICT and Sindh, but lacks full prohibitions and robust enforcement nationwide, especially where Section 89 still looms.
Why does it persist?
Confusing legal terrain outside ICT/Sindh, where bans are embedded in circulars rather than implementation, and where Section 89 has not been explicitly displaced, teachers and administrators often argue that they acted within a tolerated disciplinary culture. Many public and private schools lack trained child-protection focal persons, safe reporting channels, or mandatory incident logs. This allows abuse to be resolved informally, often with pressure on families to “forgive” for the sake of the teacher’s career or the school’s reputation.
“Principals and teachers, for the sake of the school’s reputation, make the teacher apologise in some cases but the discriminatory behaviour in the class with specific students remain on concern,” shares Amber Saba whose daughter faced beating from a teacher and later the same teachers failed her in her subject. “I had to change her school later because the teacher was humiliating my daughter in front on the class like it a was punishment for complaining about her beating.”
Other the school, if a seminary is unregistered, oversight is minimal in that case. Even registered institutions may fall between regulatory stools, religious boards, Auqaf departments, and interior ministries, sabotaging accountability. Surveys and qualitative studies consistently find that a sizable share of adults view physical punishment as necessary to enforce discipline and improve grades, despite evidence of harm to children’s mental health and attendance.
How the rules are exploited:
In private schools, owners and principals navigate between policy and business risk. Handbooks often replace the word corporal with physical restraint or manual correction, and discipline committees record behavioural interventions. Where law is not explicit, loopholes fill the void. Parents who complain can be offered fee waivers or transfers without any transparent disciplinary proceedings against staff. Regulatory authorities typically move only when a complaint lands formally or a clip trends. “My son was in eighth standard when one of his teachers slapped her in front of the class,” shares Simeen Karim. “He was not just humiliated, but he refused to go back to school because of the embarrassment he faced.” Karim had to go and complain after which the teacher was removed from the class but not sacked.
While in public schools, teachers point to overcrowded classrooms, pressure to deliver test scores, and a lack of training in non-violent classroom management. Some insist the ban makes discipline impossible, a sentiment documented in multiple qualitative studies, even though evidence shows such punishment worsens attendance and outcomes. “I agree that disciplining children is necessary, but where to draw that line then,” Zehra explains. “What kind of beating is okay and what is not, the role of the teacher in disciplining is as important as that of parents, and one of the two cannot do the complete job singlehandedly.”
“There is a saying spare the rod and spoil the child,” says Reverend Father Mario Rodrigues, Principal of St. Patrick’s School, Karachi. “That was a saying we grew up with. But nowadays we have changed this because psychologists, child developers, etc. feel that this has tarnished many of the children their whole life being trained by the rod. That is why in a certain way I agree corporal punishment should be banned totally. But at the same time what happens is that teaching becomes very difficult because now students, they know that the teacher can’t do anything sothey sometimes disrespect the teacher and they answer back. In our times, if a teacher entered the school ground carrying books, we would all run up to help the teacher as children. But nowadays the teacher can be overloaded with anything, but no one will budge. They will all stand there, and laugh or make fun. I think there has to be some balance between corporal punishment and training the children and to bring up our children in a proper way. What’s happening is we are losing it totally, because you can’t punish the child, or do anything to reprimand or correct them and it becomes very difficult to control them anymore.”
Whereas in madressahhs, which are regulated seminaries, codes of conduct may ban violence, but many madressahhs, particularly in rural belts, rely on an older idea of rote memorisation enforced by fear. The alleged five hours of torture in the Swat case, along with frequent reports of beatings of young children for not memorising verses, reveal how quickly discipline can collapse into assault when oversight is absent.
The human cost
Children subjected to corporal punishment are more likely to miss school, drop out, and suffer anxiety and depression. Pakistan’s own rights institutions and medical community have repeatedly called it a public-health issue. The Human Rights Commission’s annual reports highlight consistent media-documented cases; paediatricians and psychologists warn that what is framed as discipline inflicts trauma that reflects into adulthood.
Parliament and provincial assemblies should replicate ICT/Sindh-style prohibitions across all public and private schools, madresahs, day care, and alternative care, expressly displacing Section 89 as a defence. Without explicit, blanket bans, prosecutors are left to fight uphill against cultural headwinds.
Every school and seminary should be required to designate and train a child-protection focal person; maintain incident registers; and report serious incidents to a central child-protection authority within 24 hours. Compromise should not close cases involving bodily harm.
Private-school registrars and madressahh boards must make continued registration contingent on a clean safeguarding record, independent audits, and camera coverage in common areas with strict privacy guardrails. Teacher-training curricula in all provinces need compulsory modules on non-violent classroom management and child psychology. Where pilots have done this, outcomes improve without violence. The NCRC’s State of Children in Pakistan 2024 and subsequent annual reports are a start, but the federation needs standardised, province-wise reporting with public dashboards. If violence is not counted, it is easier to deny.
In the Swat killing, the system responded quickly: arrests, remand, a public reckoning. Prosecutors also invoked the KP Child Protection Act, an encouraging sign that existing tools can be used forcefully where they exist. But the same week, parents in another district were forgiving a teacher on video; elsewhere, a clip of a beating sparked outrage and then silence.
Pakistan knows what works. ICT and Sindh have shown how explicit statutes reshape norms, how court orders can strip away old legal shields, and how clarity empowers police and prosecutors. But as long as a child’s right to learn without fear depends on their postcode and whether a bystander happens to hit record slogan, will only remain more aspiration than protection. The stakes could not be clearer. They were written, again, in Swat.
The legal landscape, province by province
Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT).
• Status: Full statutory prohibition via the ICT Prohibition of Corporal Punishment Act (2021); Section 89 suspended by the Islamabad High Court in 2020.
• Scope: Applies to public and private schools, non-formal settings, seminaries, childcare institutions, and juvenile homes.
Sindh.
• Status: Prohibited under the Sindh Prohibition of Corporal Punishment Act (2016; rules adopted 2021).
• Scope: Applies across educational and day-care settings.
Punjab.
• Status: Departmental and regulatory bans, including the long-running maar nahin, pyar policy and circulars for government and partner schools; no single, comprehensive statute that displaces Section 89 across all settings.
• Practice: Enforcement varies; private-sector compliance hinges on inspections and contracts.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
• Status: Child protection law provides offences for violence against children; education department directives discourage corporal punishment, but a comprehensive, explicit statutory prohibition across all school types remains a work in progress.
Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan.
• Status: Child-protection measures exist; comprehensive, explicit bans on ICT/Sindh have been advocated but are not implemented across all settings. (Child-rights trackers note GB has debated prohibition; implementation status is uneven.)
Cases timeline:
Swat, 2025, a beaten to death
After the death of the young seminarian in Khwazakhela on July 22, 2025, police arrested 11 suspects, including the seminary’s administrator. An FIR invoked murder and child-protection provisions, and a court granted a two-day remand. The case has triggered a broader reckoning in the area with calls for monitoring of unregistered religious schools.
Jamrud, 2025, violence in a government school
In May, a primary school head in Jamrud, Khyber district, allegedly tortured a student who later died. The incident shows corporal punishment is not confined to religious settings, but it also persists within public sector institutions despite policy bans.
Arifwala, 2024
When a 10-year-old girl in a government school bore stick marks across her back, her brother’s video forced a police case, but the family then publicly forgave the teacher. Police said they moved because the video went viral, not because an internal safeguarding system flagged the abuse.
Faisalabad, 2024, a madrassah beating on camera.
A Thikriwala area video showing a seminary teacher brutally beating a child led to an FIR and arrest, after online outrage. Such episodes are common enough that rights groups now track them as a distinct subset of abuse.
Lahore, 2019
Seventeen-year-old Hunain Bilal’s death after a classroom beating in Lahore remains a touchstone for campaigners. His case featured prominently in advocacy to suspend Section 89 in ICT and to pass the capital’s prohibition law.
