Tirupur Childline had in the last 10 months stopped 109 child marriages and rescued 72 child labourers in the district.
Talking to reporters regarding the Childline Friends Week being observed from November 14 to 20, Mariyala Project Director Lourdu Sahayam and Childline Director Baskaran said that child marriage practice was prevalent across communities and castes pre-dominantly due to reasons of poverty. It is also pertinent to note that quality time spent by parents on children had come down and as many as 50 cases of corporal punishment had come to notice, a majority of them in private schools. Students were subjected to physical violence in the name of punishment, they said.
Factors that psychologically affect children at an young age, gets accumulated and explodes in the form of bad conduct or they display it through violent behaviour, they said.
Though children are not addicted to liquor, indirect forms of addiction was on the rise. Parents, who work in hosiery units for 12 hours spent very little time with children. This had resulted in children going astray and in getting into bad habits, they added. Though Childline had come into existence, given the exponential increase in violence against children and abuse of children, there is a lot more that needs to be done to protect children, they added.
Referring to child labour, both said that employment of children below 16 years still continued and in the last 10 months, 72 such children were rescued.
Children are first sent to work for two to three months during summer vacation and lured by the income, they become dropouts and continue to work at the cost of education. North Indian migrant children are also made to work, they added.
