To the chilling timeline of child rape in India was recently added the sexual assault on a six-year-old child by her teacher in a Bangalore school.
The Class One student was raped in a storeroom on the campus allegedly by the school’s skating instructor, who, it later emerged, had been sacked from his previous school for abusing children there. On his laptop and mobile phone were video downloads of children being raped.
The incident exposed the extreme vulnerability of children in Indian schools, which operate without an enforceable protocol on child protection, sparking massive protests, and prompting the Karnataka government to issue a 70-point guideline for schools in the State.
This was the second case of child rape in less than two months in an Indian school that made national and international headlines. On May 29, the horrific ordeal of underprivileged children in a boarding school in Karjat city of Maharashtra came to light. The owner of the school allegedly raped them and made them watch pornographic films and act them out with one another. When they refused to obey him, they were fed faeces.
Of the 38,868 reported cases of child rape recorded by the National Crime Records Bureau from 2009 to 2013 around the country, the biggest share, by all accounts, is of children raped in their own homes or neighbourhood. A good proportion also comes from children’s shelters, schools and juvenile homes — places where children congregate and spend most of their time outside home, says Vidya Reddy, director, Tulir Centre for the Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse, Chennai.
Making schools safer
Without a “child protection policy”, institutions that have an obligation to ensure a child’s well-being can turn into sites of their abuse, not least by figures of authority. Child sex offenders are often “professional perpetrators” who seek out working environments where they have easy access to children, much like what happened in the Bangalore school, she says.
An enforceable child protection policy will ensure the safety of children in ways which existing laws do not: that is, create a safe environment that prevents abuse from happening in the first place, says Swagata Raha, a senior legal Research Assistant at the Centre for Child and the Law, National Law School of India University, Bangalore.
As comprehensive as the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012 is, this recent law, along with provisions of the Right to Education Act and the Juvenile Justice Act, prescribe punitive action for crimes against children — but not measures that safeguard against them.
“A child protection policy is not yet a requirement in any law. But such a policy or protocol is essential to create a safe and enabling environment for children,” Ms. Raha says.
Sexuality education
This could include protocols to be followed while hiring non-teaching and teaching staff and training teachers on how to administer modules in life skill and sexuality education so young children are empowered with a vocabulary to articulate abuse. Teachers and other staff need also be trained to detect signs of child abuse and to encourage children to report abuse suffered even outside the school, she added.
Much like the Vishaka Guidelines issued by the Supreme Court to prevent sexual harassment at the workplace, a similarly enforceable set of guidelines for children’s educational and residential facilities may be one solution, says Shubhada Maitra, Professor at the Centre for Health and Mental Health, School of Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. “Schools should ideally have an internal complaints committee similar to those prescribed by the Vishaka Guidelines, representing parents, students, teachers and experts from outside with powers for inquiry and dismissal of staff when there are allegations of abuse,” she says.
Reinventing the wheel?
But what of existing laws? Laws and their provision that govern child abuse need to be implemented before we “reinvent the wheel”, Ms. Reddy says. For instance, the Juvenile Justice Act mandates State governments to form inspection committees to monitor regularly the hundreds of juvenile justice homes in the country. Yet, most States do not even have functional committees, says a 2013 report by the Asian Centre for Human Rights.
The report describes these homes as “hell-holes” where “inmates are subjected to sexual assault and exploitation, torture and ill treatment.” The perpetrators, again, were largely people in authority — managers, directors, owners and their relatives and friends.
Similarly, a year and a half after the POCSO Act was enacted prescribing penalties for every barbaric form of sexual abuse against children and chalking out special guidelines for the judiciary, police and medical practitioners to follow, children are not quite protected from the aggressive nature of the legal process.
Unheard and unseen
The latest National Crime Records Bureau report says 12,363 child rapes were recorded by the police in 2013, more than double the number reported five years ago (5,368 in 2009), attributable in part to an increase in police complaints being lodged.
