There is a lot of skepticism in the country related to homeless people and beggars because of past cases where people were caught in the act of lying or faking their physical disability. And it is no secret that children are often exploited in these situations for gaining sympathy, sometimes by their parents and sometimes by the beggar mafia they are a part of.

Well, a video recently surfaced on social media that has given more weight to this skepticism.

In a video that’s been circulating, two woman are doing a makeover of a healthy child to give him the look of an injured one, for begging in Baldia Town, Karachi

The secretly recorded video revealed a woman giving a child the makeover of an injured, while the video clearly shows that the child is a healthy one with no injuries.

The woman can be seen using banana and mehndi to make a bleeding wound on the child’s face and gave him the desired look of an injured child. She can also be seen fixing the bandage on the face and head of the child in order to fake his condition.

Another woman who was supposed to play the role of the child’s mother also had a bandage on her hand to deceive people.

It has been known that beggar mafia use such tactics to garner sympathies of people passing by and they have been exposed earlier too.

In fact, children are the most common victims of this hustle perpetrated by this beggar mafia. Seeing children, like the one in the video, is a disheartening sight. In order to elicit sympathy of people and earn more from their pitiful condition, they are either forced to fake a disability or injury or one or more of their limbs is cruelly amputated in real. These children are malnourished too to make them seem more miserable.

It is believed that a lot of such children are kidnapped at an early age and forced to beg on the street. Karachi, being a metropolitan city, and the hub of economic activity, attracts more of such people to carry on with their business and earn a livelihood.

According to the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) in Pakistan, there are 1.2 million children on the streets of major cities and the urban center of Pakistan

This is just the number of children who beg, apart from children there are a number of beggars who are mostly disabled or claim to be disabled.

Child beggary is indeed a violation of the fundamental rights that all children should have. It denies children of the right to be safe from harm and to have a space and opportunity to achieve their full potential. Unless some efforts are made to tackle this menace in our society, these organized gangs will continue to mutilate and exploit defenseless children.

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Cover image via: fajarmag.com / ARY NEWS via DailyMotion