THE Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting took place far away from Peshawar and almost two years ago to the day of the Army Public School massacre. Grotesque and horrific, it took fewer lives than our scores dead. On that day, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, armed with automatic weapons, stormed into the building and killed 20 children and six staff members, in a school in Connecticut, US.

Months later, the parents of one of the children who survived spoke about how the attack had ravaged the mind of her child; standing just a single wall away, she heard people pleading for their lives, she heard the gunshots, she watched them die.

Months later, the six-year-old girl struggles with sleeplessness and nightmares. She is afraid to go to school.

There are so many more like her in Peshawar, children whose slumber has been shattered and innocence seized by the carnage.

Wherever they may be, all attacks on schools share a singular architecture of horror; for a school istheñrstspacethatanychildlearnstotrustbeyond the home. A violated school, a massacred school, a school full of dead children, a school full of blood, is for this reason representative of a moral violation of the most inhuman sort, where this first act of human faith, the trust of a child in his teacher, in adults other than his or her parents, is shaken and destroyed forever.

No condemnation, no condolences can provide reprieve; once the words `we have killed all the children, what do we do now` have been spoken in a country, they cannot be unsaid.

Beyond Peshawar, there are many more. In these the grim days, the pall of sorrow is being borne by Pakistan`s youngest, who have suddenly watched children just like them, children in uniform, children listening to teachers, children carrying schoolbags, transformed into dead children in shrouds and coffins. In our times of televised tragedy, the images are everywhere and inescapable, the parents left confounded.

In the week gone by, one child who attended a vigil at school came home to question a parent about why she hadn`t let her see the news coverage of the event. Other smaller children who had seen it, orheard about it, cried in their nursery classroom because they were afraid of being shot. One other group of schoolgoing teenagers preparing for the same ninth and tenth class examinations that were being held at Army Public School, wondered if the aged caretaker who manned their school gate would be able to ward off suicide bombers.

Such is the grim detritus of Peshawar that has transformed the generation just blooming, and now bereft with loss before they can believe in life. In its place, the government has tried to take some account of these unseen wounds that have maimed and massacred so far beyond Peshawar.

Amid the flurry of pledges that accompany theaftermath of every terror attack, one promise was made by the Ministry of National Health Services in Islamabad, which announced that it would be holding `counselling sessions` for `post-traumatic stress management` for the children who have survived the attack. The first phase of the plan, prepared in conjunction with psychiatrists in the Pakistan Army and with the assistance of Unicef and WHO, would focus on the children immediately affected; the second, it is said, will focus on all the other children around the country. Modules and materials on dealing with post-traumatic stress, the committee promised in its emergency meeting in Islamabad, would soon be provided to the public.

In times of ordinary terror, perhaps, some dark and cold humour could be sifted from the statementits perfunctory promise of psychiatric healing against a catastrophe that was too large to imagine, until it no longer belonged to the realm of the fictive.

In this real world, into which Pakistani children are born, the innocent can be 1(illed, are killed, will continue to be killed, for the sins of the distant others.

Children in an auditorium, children waiting to take a test, children late for class, children no longer children.

The choices for their parents are based not on whether they can shield them from this world of terror, but rather when to tell them and how and in what words about the danger that can unpredictably, suddenly, consume them just as it did the children in Peshawar.

Pakistani children learn about injustice from a tender age as they do about their position in a society riven by class, caste and prejudice. The twists and turns of Pakistan`s complicated moral universe teaches them fast and fervently that few rules are without exceptions: elders are to be respected unless they are your servants, lies must not be told unless they serve your interests and the weak must not be trod upon unless they belong to a different faith or family. The aftermath of Peshawar, the fate of the children left behind, will be ordered by the discriminatory dimensions of these other Pakistani realities, which existed before and will continue to exist after the tragedy.

The lives of the children left behind after Peshawar will be different. The children of the rich will have thicker cordons of guards deployed outside their schools, with bigger guns and more bullets to assure them of a security that is unavailable to others. The children of the poor, who look at schools only from the outside, will continue to walk by not daring to dream of a realm that does not belong to them. The children of the meagre middle will continue to fill classrooms, stanch their fears of sudden death with their hopes of becoming something, a doctor, a lawyer, a something or anything other than a terrorist`s easy target.• The writer is an attomey teaching constitutional law and political philosophy rafia.zakaria@gmail.com