Only last month, a 16-year-old boy convinced his adult friend to sneak into a girl’s house in North-West Delhi. They sexually abused her, killed her and then again raped her lifeless body. A month earlier, two juveniles abducted a two-year-old girl from West Delhi’s Nihal Vihar and raped her in a public park.
These are only a few of the ‘heinous’ crimes committed by juveniles this year. Over the years, there has only been an increase in juveniles’ involvements in crimes in the national Capital. Till June this year, 1,180 juveniles have been apprehended for crimes ranging from thefts to rapes-cum-murders.
Through entire last year, 2,012 juveniles were nabbed from the city for various crimes. That was 18 per cent increase compared to the number in 2013. Across India, 36,800 juveniles have been apprehended between January 2012 and June 2015, reveals National Crime Records Bureau data.
Some of these children were as young as 10 and 12 years. Not all the ‘heinous’ crimes by the children were committed at the spur of the moment. Some of them went about craftily planning the crimes before successfully executing them, say senior police officers.
A few juvenile accused did well to evade the police for sometime. In one rape and another rape-cum-murder case this year, the juvenile suspects joined the protesters demanding justice before they were identified to be the alleged assailants.
Quick money, friendship with the opposite sex, aspirations and lust happened to be the motivations behind most of these crimes involving juveniles as accused. A 17-year-old couple needing money to make it big in dance reality shows kidnapped a little boy and then pushed him off a cliff when they could not get the ransom money.
Police say they have been adopting various strategies to discourage teenagers from taking to crime. They regularly hold counselling classes for children caught for petty crimes and often rope in religious leaders to drive their point.
Now, the police intend to map the behavioural patterns of some juvenile suspects in their bid to keep children off crimes and are in talks with some Delhi University professors for this.
