The bus driver who has raped 12 little boys (and doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong): Why thousands of Pakistani children are falling prey to paedophiles

REPORT: Ijaz, a bus conductor in his early twenties, spends his days travelling through the bustling streets of Peshawar in northern Pakistan, working hard to scrape a living.
The pay is low and the hours are long, and Ijaz, like many of his colleagues, remains unwed and has no family.
Instead of going home come nightfall, he, and many others, spend their time with street children, paying them as little as 75p for sex and when they have no money, brutally abusing them.
But the children falling prey to these men aren’t the ones you might expect. With girls kept at home by their parents, the majority of victims are boys – some as young as six years old.
‘Once, there was a boy on the bus and everyone had sex with him,’ confesses Ijaz who admits to raping 12 different children during his career as a bus conductor.
‘I did it too but what else could I do? They invited me. And he was that kind of boy anyway.’
Sexual abuse in Pakistan is rife. An estimated four million children in the country are forced into work from an early age due to poverty and of those, more than a million live on the streets where they are easy prey for men like Ijaz.
A recent survey of 1,800 men found that a third believe that not only is raping little boys not a crime, it’s not even a bad thing to do.
As a result, an estimated 90 per cent of street children have been victims of sexual abuse at some point in their lives.