What's worse than the death penalty?

Imagine, just for a moment, and not in the noncommittal way of a facebook status update or a me-too twitter tweet, that one of the children from the Hussain Khanwala village atrocity was you. 

Visualize the kidnapping: There you are, just minding your business, kicking a rock around pretending to be a brown Lionel Messi when this larger human being grabs you, lifts you up, and against your will, thanks only to the unfair advantage of his size, shoves you in a van or a sack or something dark and unwelcoming and no matter how much you resist, or how much you kick and scream, your body is now on a trajectory that you did not initiate nor do you have any authority to intercept. Imagine that helplessness, that sense of dread. Imagine that fear.

Even if that train of thought were to end at all of it being just a sick joke it would still be a traumatic experience. But that's not how it ends for those children, and therefore, in this exercise in empathy, it won't for you either. 

Therefore, imagine on and find yourself finally released from the enforced bondage in to an unfamiliar place. Stark and dimly lit, strange and foreboding. There is a mattress there. A low hanging light bulb and the shadows of several sins. You can feel the aura of evil, the smell of horrors already rendered here but you can't connect the dots. You are a 6-7-8-10-14 year old child after all, what do you know of the depravity mankind is capable of? You haven't followed the harrowing brutalities of Josef Fritzl, Raymond Buckey, Gerald Amirault or any of the other monsters that have served to remind us that human nature is capable of inconceivable amounts of evil. So the mattress to you is a place to relax. Perhaps you belong to a family so poor that the mattress seems more appealing than your corner on the floor of the thatch roofed hut you call home. But not for long. Soon the mattress becomes the place where you are forced to lie face down to have a needle stuck in your spinal cord so you can not react, not defend yourself, not ruin the video by seeming like you are not a party to the most vicious possible violation of your humanity. 

Imagine the act itself. Imagine it and realize that you can't. You can't even imagine it being done to you, your children, nieces, nephews, even the kids you don't like because they are annoying and break your crystal ware every time they visit. You probably can't even imagine your adult self being forced to go through such humiliating abuse. Now realize, that this thing that you can't even imagine and it probably makes you lose your breath and crinkle your nose in disgust and maybe even vomit and curl up in the fetal position to cry, this thing actually happened. To over 200 hundred children. Repeatedly. 

Over 200. That many children can fill up an auditorium. Imagine the auditorium filled with these permanently scarred and violated children for whom the world is nothing more than a place where monsters not only exist but thrive. Can there be any one place on the universe more saddening, heartbreaking and spirit shattering than that auditorium? That Village where only broken children live? 

The worst part is that it doesn't end there. The children who lived through the horror must contend with it to even graver depths of inhumanity. There was black mail to follow. And videos were sold. There were bidding wars over the visual proof of the massacre of these children's innocence. There honor and childhood were sold for 40 rupees per pervert. The sins keep piling and getting exponentially worse and there is nothing, no cure, no drug, no respite, no restitution for the victims for as long as they shall live. 

Maybe if we could wipe their memories and render unto them the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind. But such kindnesses only exist in flights of fancy, flights that we can be certain these children must often board. What can we offer them then,  us impotent guardians of these children, the ones who are fuming at the mouth and showcasing our useless discontent across the twittersphere but can't even imagine the actual horror let alone understand it?

Perhaps we can collectively question if the death penalty for the culprits be justice enough? Will it suffice? Or should we collectively, as a nation imagine those children to be our children, to be us and figure out what is worse than the death penalty for that, and that alone,  surely is what the demons deserve.