By: Alghaia Aftab
When Amna turned five, she had never touched grass.
Born inside a women’s prison in Pakistan, her world consisted of grey walls, barred windows, and the echo of alarms. Her mother was serving a sentence for a petty theft she committed in desperation. Amna wasn’t the one sentenced, but in every way that mattered, she was serving time too.
Across Pakistan, dozens of children are growing up in prisons. Not because they committed crimes, but because their mothers did. These children, often unnamed in records, uncounted by policy, and unseen by society, are the invisible collateral of a justice system that was never designed with them in mind.
Pakistani prison law, under Rule 364 of the Pakistan Prison Rules, permits children under six to live with their incarcerated mothers. In theory, this provision exists to protect the mother-child bond. In reality, it functions more like a loophole, one that quietly allows the state to abdicate responsibility for child welfare by pushing it behind prison gates.
There is no national registry of children living in prisons in Pakistan. No official data on their health, education, or even basic identification. A 2022 visit to a women’s prison in Punjab by a legal aid NGO revealed that several children lacked birth certificates or NADRA registration. Without an identity, they do not exist in the eyes of the state.
Attachment theory, the backbone of child psychology, tells us that early bonds with caregivers shape a child’s emotional blueprint for life. International studies of mother and child units (M&Cs) show that when done right, they can reduce trauma, support rehabilitation, and even lower recidivism. But “done right” means full access to healthcare, early education, outdoor space, emotional support, and legal protections. Most Pakistani jails offer none of this.
Instead, many children grow up confined in concrete spaces, exposed to violence, poor nutrition, and inadequate hygiene. A 2018 Human Rights Commission report noted that many children inside women’s prisons suffer developmental delays, anxiety, and social withdrawal. Some prison staff discourage mother-child bonding out of “disciplinary necessity.” Others simply don’t have the resources to care.
Incarcerated mothers are often excluded from vocational programmes because they’re full-time caregivers. There are no creches, no trained nannies, and in some cases, other inmates are asked to babysit, an alarming compromise in an already fragile environment.
One day, they will grow up and ask what we did when we knew. Let our silence not be our only answer. Let it be said that someone counted them. That someone broke the silence. That someone remembered that even behind bars, a child is still a child.
This is not just a matter of oversight. It’s a matter of rights. Article 25 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Pakistan is a signatory, states that every child is entitled to a standard of living adequate for their physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social development. That right does not pause at a prison gate.
Even more disturbingly, Bangkok Rule 49 requires that non-custodial measures should be prioritized for pregnant women and mothers with young children. Pakistan’s system, however, offers little in terms of alternatives, no real probation options, diversion programmes, or restorative justice routes tailored for women with caregiving responsibilities.
And so the children remain behind bars.
We do not see them. We do not count them. But they exist, not in government ledgers, but in the shadows of policy failure. They exist in overcrowded cells, in the hush of a sick child denied medical care, in the confusion of a toddler who thinks “bars” are part of every home.
Why are we afraid to talk about this? Perhaps because it exposes the cruelty of a system that punishes not just the convicted but the innocent born into its shadow. Perhaps because these children challenge our neat categories of guilt and innocence. Or maybe because we are uncomfortable with what their existence demands of us: accountability.
Let us not pretend that a child in prison is just a byproduct. That she’ll forget the grey walls. That the state owes her nothing. These are our children, not by birth, but by duty. And we are failing them.
One day, they will grow up and ask what we did when we knew. Let our silence not be our only answer.
Let it be said that someone counted them. That someone broke the silence. That someone remembered that even behind bars, a child is still a child.
The writer is a freelance columnist
