f f I must have been six when my mother W W asked me to leave the house because she had a client over. Then I did not know what that `uncle` was there for and I went to the street and ended up sleeping in the cold. My home was just a one room unit, where we lived. It often happened like that.

Maybe my mother was trying to be protective in whatever way she thought was right,` says Z, a sex worker from Orangi Town. In her 30s, Z never married and does not have kids.

`Any man who marries a prostitute is just trying to diminish his guilt. I have seen men treat their wives badly and even if these girls try to forsake this line of work, they are always taunted and mistreated. It was my decision not to have kids. I would never want a six-year-old to sleep in the street on a cold winter night,` she says.

According to rough estimates, there are some 2,000 children under the age of 18 from sex workers living in Karachi`s Napier Road alone.

In July this year, Pakistan ratified the UN`s Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. While it all seems well, for the children of red light areas or many low-end, home-based sex workers, this optional protocol along with other conventions remains `useless` They might seem like the children you would come across in any low income area but what sets the young of the red light area apart from other poor kids is the fact that they are matured way beyond their years and not in a good way.

Already stigmatised for `hailing from the seedy part of town`, the children of Napier Road or Shahi Mohalla or any home-based sex worker find themselves with limited opportunities.

`All they see around them is squalor and hopelessness,` says Mirza Alim Baig, presidentof Gender and Reproductive Health Forum, `I still remember the time when I set up my office at Napier Road. We were running a prevention and awareness programme for HIV/Aids and other STDs in 2008. One day I went to the office very early, around six in the morning, and saw very young kids, some as young as three, loitering in the alleys. That day I asked around in the community as to why these kids were out, and it turned out that their mothers were busy dealing with clients and no one was there to look after them.` That encounter led to the formation of a small classroom type setup where Baig and his outreach workers started informal education.

`Some 29 children got enrolled and their mothers would proudly go around telling everyone that their kids were going to school. Our aim was to get them started. Some did continue their studies. But that is a very small number.

The fact remains that these children have nothing being offered to them, be it their parents, their peers, the government or the social welfare sector. What is worse is that years of abuse take their toll,` says Baig.

While it is true that the children`s norms are different but a child is a child and s/he always vies for his mother`s attention. The kids do not take this neglect easily. Many start drugs and drinking early. Since many cannot buy drugs, they try the leftovers in their homes that client men bring with them; this eventually leads to abuse.

`While the young girls are guarded carefully by their mothers or the brothel owners, the boys are often iuistreated and their needs overlooked,` adds Baig, `This leads to their exploitation where men lure them by offering them drinks or sweets. This cycle is repeated again and again and there is no way out. We often notice suicidal tendencies among these kids, some of them barely in their teens.

`The kids from such homes are highly depressed and suffer from severe mental and physical trauma,` says Quratulain Arif, a clinical psychologist at the Ziauddin Medical University, `They see things and are in a situation where no child should be.` Talking about a case, where a child of a sex worker came to her for counselling, she says, `He was a young boy and very much in need of help. Though counselling helped to an extent, at the end of the day he had to go back to the same surroundings and that sort of became a futile exercise. I saw him after a gap of a few years; by then he was 15.What shocked me was the way he had changed.

It`s called survival and he became like the others around him.

In worst case scenarios, she says, the kids often exhibit violent tendencies and are not afraid of harming others. `The boys at times feel protective of their mothers and when they can`t shoo away the clients, they indulge in harming others and at times are into self-harm,` explains Arif, `On the other end, many become sexuallyactive very early and indulge in risky behaviour that exposes them to STDs and other ailments.

An olTicial from the Ministry of Human Rights said: `We have all the relevant laws on paper but we fail to implement them. What we need is a cohesive approach. The education, health and home departments, along with the human rights ministry, must sit down and chalk out a strategy where these kids are given a chance at a better life.` E