January 2014: A taxi driver in West Bengal charged that the police was threatening him to give up his fight for justice for his daughter. His daughter was 16 when she was allegedly raped over two days in October last by six men, in Madhyamgram, near the state’s capital of Kolkata. They reportedly then set her on fire.
July 2014: Surya Prakash from Theni in southern Tamil Nadu turned 14 and was sent to Chennai to work in a grocery store. His father had just died. A few weeks later, Surya ran away because he was being ‘hit black and blue’ nearly everyday, and the task of unloading and loading cargo was too much for him.
May 2014: Two girls went out to a field that was used as a toilet area in Khatra village, Badaun district, Uttar Pradesh. They never came back. The next morning they were found hanging from a tree. A post-mortem report confirmed that the girls had been raped and hung up on the tree while they were still alive.
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October 2014: A three-year-old was allegedly raped in a school in Bangalore. Activists in Karnataka say there have been nine cases of sexual assault on children in school this year; five since July.
It seems as if this past year, and the ones leading up to it, has unleashed an unprecedented amount of violence on children. This has possibly been happening all along, behind closed doors, with some of us suspicious of what might be happening, or mostly not even that.
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Hidden in Plain Sight , the title of UNICEF’s recent statistical analysis of violence against children, says it all. Jeffrey O’Malley, Director, Division of Data, Research and Policy, UNICEF, says, “Despite the difficulties in measuring violence against children, and considerable gaps, an unprecedented volume of data on the subject has become available over the last two decades that is providing the evidence countries need to develop effective policies, legislation and programmes to address violence.”
There certainly has been a lot more reporting of violence these past few years, than in the past, says an activist working in the education sector. “But there has always been a lot of violence towards children,” she reasons. “We tend not to take children seriously at all. If a child is sitting in the bus, we unthinkingly ask him or her to move. We take the child for granted.”
Is it just media attention then that seems to make the world a nasty place for the children of this nation?
“We definitely have a lot more media attention these days, but perhaps it has got a little more perverse, especially with children being out of schools, and working in the informal sectors the growth in trafficking,” says Dr. Shantha Sinha, former chairperson, National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, and Magsaysay Award winner. “Earlier we used to talk of the feminisation of the labour force; now it is child labourisation of the work force. Children are entering the labour force in an unprecedented way; it has never been this way before. It is alarming.”
But that still assumes a child has survived the multiple odds to be drawn into the labour force, literally. The UNICEF report notes that India comes third in a list of homicide victims among children and adolescents aged 0 to 19 years in 2012. Son preference still guides a significant percentage of the population, in both rural and urban centres. According to the Census report, the child sex ratio (the number of females per 1,000 males in the 0-6 age group) is 919/1000.
Another key issue is the question of education — its integral ability to retain children, keep them out of trouble, and facilitate a better life. Sinha says, “Many promises were made by the Right to Education Act. At least initially, 2009-2011, there were a lot of debates and discussions. However, all that has been whittled down to mere cynicism today.” The failure of yet another law to ensure the rights of children as gloriously envisioned by it is indeed disappointing. Ossie Fernandes, advisor, CACL, quotes statistics to say nearly one crore children are now labourers in the country, while more than 1.3 crore do not attend school.
Even if enrolment is not a problem in some areas, retaining children in schools continues to be a problem, says an expert who has been tracking such issues across the country. “Children are on the rolls, but out of school. This is because the school does not provide a satisfactory environment, and also because children find it more exciting to be out of schools. These children drop out for good, and re-integration into the system is very tough, except for those who have been forced into labour.”
Gopinath ran away from school in his home district of Salem in Tamil Nadu. He says he used to be beaten up regularly for not bringing what was required of students. “Sometimes it would be a book, chart paper or pencils. Both my parents were dead and my grandmother brought me up. She could not afford to buy me those things, but the teachers never understood this.” He was lucky to have found, three years later, some support with Karunalaya, a Chennai-based NGO.
“To say that compulsory education should be only up to the age of 14 years is to have a cock-eyed view of things,” says Girija Kumarababu, member, Juvenile Justice Board (JJB), Tamil Nadu. “We must endeavour to keep children in school for as long as it takes, and they must want to stay in school. Unless we do that, children will be out of schools, trafficked, or run away towards what they perceive as a better place.”
A lot of children constantly run away from fractured, abusive homes, explains Paul Sunder Singh of Karunalaya. “They head towards Chennai or Mumbai or Hyderabad, lured by the glamour of the film industry, hoping to be heroes, heroines, or land some role or the other. They are trafficked and then isolated let into the work force, commercial sex, or forced to steal and beg on the roads.”
Kumarababu explains, “We see a number of cases in the JJB of children — migrants who are forced to smuggle heroin, or steal cell phones. When we question them, we realise they have been pushed into this by the family itself, in exchange for a loan to tide over some domestic crisis.” If there is no support system in their home state, they are sent back to their family; on completion of the vicious circle, they are forced back into similar exploitative circumstances.
Even in apparently affluent circumstances, children are not immune from abuse, as is clear from the spate of rapes reported from Bangalore schools.
The abuser is within the schools. “We no longer live in an innocent society,” says Christine Beddoe, advisor to British Parliament on child abuse. “Much more diligence must go into background checks and validation of documents of persons who are applying to access children in institutions. Now, people take at face value these documents, and don’t check; that’s where the problem starts. When you’ve got through checking of documents, it also acts as a preventative tool.”
“Cases are now out in the open, unlike in the past, but what we are seeing is still the tip of the iceberg only,” Sinha points out. “We are only hearing of abuse in the public domain, in institutions, schools, homes. The larger problem is in the private domain, abuse by family members, and that is still a big secret.”
“Everyday violence may be pervasive, but it is not inevitable. The first step in curbing all forms of violence against children is bringing the issue to light — in all its complexity,” says O’Malley in his note in Hidden in Plain Sight . In a country where the constitution guarantees equal rights to every citizen, and there are multiple laws to enforce this grand principle, we clearly do not have as much will as we have ways, to ensure that children live their childhood and have equal opportunities for growth.