Comment

Child abuse – the hidden truth

A recent report released by the Ministry of Women and Child Development has revealed the shocking scale of child abuse and neglect in India. This is the first time that data on child abuse in India has been collected at a national level and constitutes one of the world’s largest empirical, in-country studies, covering nearly 12,500 children and 4800 young adults in 13 states. The study looks at all three different forms of child abuse – sexual, physical and emotional.

The study done by the ministry, Prayas, Save the Children and Unicef shows that as many as 53 per cent children have faced one or more forms of sexual abuse, ranging from extreme forms such as rape and sexual assault to fondling and forcible kissing. In over 50 per cent of the child abuse cases, the abusers are known to the child or are in a position of trust and responsibility. Children on the street, children at work and children in institutional care reported the highest incidence of sexual assault.

A culture of silence surrounds the issue of sexual abuse and in a patriarchal society, much more effort is made to protect a powerful male rather than an innocent young child. Importantly, the study reveals that in over 70 per cent of the cases the victims of abuse do not tell anyone of their experience. Since most children remain silent, many of the perpetrators carry on, threatening them if they dare to speak. However, this does not mean that the experience is forgotten by the victim children. On the contrary, it often leaves an indelible mark on young children’s minds, leading to horrifying consequences, with research showing that in a large number of cases the abused go on to becoming abusers.

This is a landmark study as it has gone inside homes and families to talk to children about abuse, opening up a subject that has long been taboo. Child abuse and sexual abuse has often been seen as a ‘western ill’ and not something that afflicts our society. However, dig deeper and talk to people about these issues, and you will find that a majority of people have faced some sort of abuse in childhood and have never discussed it.

While sexual abuse is indeed horrific this is not the only way children are abused. The study also reveals widespread physical and emotional abuse. Nearly 65 per cent of schoolchildren reported receiving corporal punishment – beating by teachers, mostly in government schools. Of the children physically abused in families, in an astounding 88.6 per cent of the cases, parents themselves were the perpetrators.

I recently joined Save the Children to head their policy section. Moving away from my traditional area of education, I started working on the issue of child protection, looking at which children we should be targeting, the groups most in need of protection and what systems exist in our country and society for the protection of children.

As I read, travelled, talked and watched, I found that the truth was shocking. While some were at more risk than others (e.g. children out on the street), the reality is that large numbers of children in India are abused and exploited in a range of different ways and there is a silence that surrounds this issue. The incident in Nithari last year caused furore and disbelief, with people shocked that such a thing could occur in our country and right under our noses. As people working on child rights, however, we know that hundreds of children go missing every day. Most often these incidents go unreported and on the rare occasion that they are (as in Nithari), little is done about it, since children, especially those of the poor and dispossessed, come at the bottom of the pile.

The study shows that two out of every three children are abused, with boys being slightly more prone to physical abuse than girls. Physical abuse includes hitting, punching, burning, slapping or anything that causes physical injury to the child. Often the adult uses this as a form of discipline, justifying it as being for the good of the child. However, research conducted in India and in other countries has shown that corporal punishment is a major cause of children dropping out of school and affects their overall learning and development, besides being a violation of children’s right to well-being and ‘care’ from adults. Often it is the adult’s frustration or lack of parenting skills that leads them to such harsh methods, and in our society there is little opposition to this harshness. The bigger shock, therefore, is that in a majority of cases such abuse occurs within the family, with the younger group of 5-14 year olds being most vulnerable.

Every second child faces emotional abuse with an equal number of girls and boys reporting such incidents. As with physical abuse, in a vast majority of such cases parents are the perpetrators. Emotional abuse includes humiliation, threats and insults, being cursed, compared unfavourably with others, made to feel degraded and small. This is especially damaging when it comes from parents or teachers as they are the ones children look to for encouragement and positive reinforcement and are most responsible for a child’s ‘happiness’. This form of abuse was perhaps the most complex to collect data on as it is very ‘culture-specific’, with most indicators of emotional abuse seen as acceptable ways of behaving with children and therefore not perceived by the adults as being abusive. It is, therefore, remarkable that every second child interviewed in this study perceived himself as being emotionally abused.

This study has explored for the first time the extent and nature of abuse within India, showing that it cuts across age, gender and class. The government has now introduced legislation to establish the National and State Commissions for Protection of Rights of the Child and has also drafted the Offences against Children Bill, which the ministry hopes to table during the monsoon session of Parliament. The government also plan to promote the newly-formulated Integrated Child Protection Scheme which aims to create a comprehensive protection system for all children.

This study which has brought the issue of abuse out into the open needs to be discussed in forums across the country. The notion and definition of ‘abuse’ needs to be discussed within communities and understood by parents and adults. Families need to recognize and treat their children with dignity, and help them to protect themselves by providing the freedom and space to discuss their fears or worries.

Similarly, children should be provided space and access to people within the school, and services such as a ‘child line’ ought to be actively promoted. While legislation is important, a fundamental change in attitude towards how we treat our children is required, with all citizens taking responsibility for their protection and safety.

Shireen Vakil Miller

 

Killing by default – Nithari

GOING to Nithari as part of the fact finding team organized by the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), was in some ways revisiting my visit to the tsunami affected areas in 2004. Meeting the dalit communities in the tsunami affected areas, we were totally unprepared for the discrimination in relief operations. In Nithari, I was surprised to find that as many as 15 out of the 17 murdered children belonged to dalit communities.

By not recognizing the dynamic process of caste in our everyday lives, we only strengthen the barriers in reaching out and addressing the vulnerability and violence on dalits and lose opportunities of fine-tuning our mechanisms to prevent caste discrimination. We also fail to recognize the coping mechanisms of dalits and using them as a benchmark to support them further.

Jyothi, aged 10, daughter of Kinnarjia; Madhu aged 20, d/o Kiranveer; Rimpa Haldar age 14, d/o Anil Haldar; Beena Haldar, age 13 d/o Gopal Haldar; Payal age 15, d/o Nand Lal; Anjali Sarkar, 25 years old sister of Arun Sarkar; Nisha 11 years old, and Satyendra Max aged 8 years s/o Ashok Kumar – a total of 38 children/women were reported missing from Nithari village over two years. 17 out of the 38 were reported murdered in the house of Mohinder Singh Pandher in Sector 31, Noida by his servant Surender Kohli. The cases of the remaining 21 are yet to be recognized or registered. Various aspects of the crime are still shrouded in mystery, hard to believe and unacceptable to the families concerned. To repeat, 15 out of the 17 murdered children are from dalit (Scheduled Caste) families!

Some may hold this fact as not being relevant to the serial murders, its investigation process or the rendering of justice. Some may even hold that this identification is mere politicking over the killings and deaths. All aspects of the serial murders, including the fact that a majority belong to dalit communities and are also girls/women, need analysis to ensure that we recognize the vulnerabilities of certain sections of our population and take appropriate protective and preventive measures.

The excluded and marginalized can be exterminated without bothering about clues. The perpetrators adopted a modus operandi that protected them for two years from falling into the legal net. All the victims except Satyendra Max, the last in the series, were children of families that had come from other parts of the state/country to Nithari to eke out a livelihood. Since they were not part of the mainstream Nithari village, there was little pressure on the panchayat or village elders to pursue the cases. It is instructive that after two years of perfecting their modus operandi and growing bold, when the perpetrators touched the village, they targeted a dalit child. They may have believed that the village would not be sufficiently perturbed by yet another missing dalit child.

This presumption echoes what politicians tell us, ‘that such things happen’. It has parallels in that we are not too perturbed by the fact of dalit children working as bonded labourers; that 54% of dalit children are undernourished; that the infant mortality rate of dalit children is much higher than the general population; that more than 70% of dalit women do not access institutional care during delivery and that almost 90% of dalit children enrolled in Class I drop out after Class X.

The perpetrators presumed that by choosing victims from the socially excluded and marginalized communities, they would escape the consequences. Their presumption proved right for two years and in a majority of the crimes committed!

Jyothi, the ten year old daughter of Kinnarjia, was the first victim in 2005. Kinnarjia and his two sons ironed clothes in the locality for more than a decade. The family reported the matter to the police, approached senior police officials and local panchayats and politicians at the higher level and appealed to the National Commission for Women for help in finding their daughter and getting them justice. When Payal went missing on 7 May 2006, her father Nand Lal could not even get a case registered in the police station and sought the intervention of the CJM on 24 August 2006. The machinery that refused to register an FIR instead went all the way to Pipalia village in Uttaranchal to convince the villagers that Nand Lal’s daughter had eloped and was settled in Mumbai.

The victim families had named Surender Kohli and Moninder Singh Pandher in their complaints, but the police refused to register FIRs for over two years, recording them as ‘missing persons’. Despite the matter popping up occasionally in the news, and the victims approaching higher officials in many cases, the matter was not given due recognition by any of the institutions of governance.

The caste system not only peripheralizes the dalit communities, but also excludes them, defining a line between the so-called untouchable communities and other social groups. The physical phenomenon of untouchability is linked to the deep set notions of purity and pollution and the caste mindset. Thus different layers of civil society and its institutions can exclude and neglect the concerns of these communities from the purview of their duties and responsibilities. We see the operation of this mindset in that the local elected bodies, the local police force and the higher officials failed to take notice of the fact that three score families reported their children missing over a long period of two years under a single police station.

Possibly the perpetrators had no intention to accost dalit children or women in particular. However, it turns out that the number of dalit victims was disproportionately high. Dalit families do not own land or other means of livelihood despite their predominance as agricultural labourers, which pushes them to migrate to the cities in search of work. Once here, they have no access to the provisions of citizenship – most often they do not get registered under the BPL provisions; housing in secure and protected areas is not possible; basic amenities of water, electricity and sanitation are often not accessible; there is no ICDS centre where children can be sent to for pre-school education, nutrition or health care; and they have no access to the protection of the local thana or panchayats. In short, they become internal refugees, devoid of citizenship rights in the slums and urban poor areas, a doubly excluded status.

It is unfortunate that their need for and willingness to work at low rates, without proper recorded status in private homes and public places, renders them vulnerable. The women are lured with promises of work and their vulnerable situation forces them to agree without any assurance of security and without the possibility of any bargaining for better provisions. The institutional mechanisms meant to set standards for work, labour, basic amenities, or protection fail to do so because they are not designed for a population that is outside the purview of society, specially for the excluded sections.

It is a telling commentary about the institutional mechanisms we have set in place that a crime could be perpetrated for two years continuously under the nose of civil society and the administration. Or it takes the death of so many children from this strata for the official machinery to act. Though not all of us can be accused of being casteist, certainly there is a case of neglect and default for not acknowledging and recognizing that discrimination and violence on the scale that is meted out to the dalit communities needs analysis from the standpoint of caste dynamics, social group identity and exclusion. It was discrimination by default in tsunami affected areas and killing by default in Nithari!

One can legitimately ask: Would these serial killings have been possible had a majority of the victims been from any community other than dalits, the untouchables? Would the police refuse to register the complaints of about 38 families from the same locality if they were not dalits? Would not the higher level authorities of different institutions have enquired into the case if they were from any other community? Would the politicians consider these happenings as normal and bound to happen if the victims were anyone other than dalits? Most certainly not. Yet when one points out that a disproportionate majority of victims were dalits, most reasonable people argue that the matter is not relevant to the incident, to the investigation and to the judgment!

Annie Namala

 

Needed, my birth certificate

A birth certificate is more than just the official record of a child’s identity or a proof that the child belongs to a family or a community. It is the first legal acknowledgement of the child’s existence by the state. But, most often, possibly understandably so, the activist’s focus is on more immediate issues such as the child’s survival and poverty.

While survival and poverty are serious threats faced by a child, ensuring that his/her birth gets registered and certified is as critical, for that piece of paper can be a powerful tool in securing other rights of the child. First, as a proof of the child’s age, it helps protect the child from exploitative labour or early marriage, as also protects the child through invoking legal age limits, for example, in the juvenile justice system. It can help in identification following abandonment, abduction or when children are separated from their families in the event of a natural disaster. It enables children to know their parentage even if born out of wedlock. Of course, birth registration alone cannot solve the gamut of problems faced by children today, but there’s no denying that it is an integral part and the critical first step in protecting and promoting children’s rights.

Usually, when one asks parents and guardians of children about birth certificates, one receives two typical answers. In rural India, it’s usually, ‘No; we did not know that we had to register the birth of our children and get a birth certificate.’ Parents or guardians belonging to educated families in urban areas usually respond with, ‘Yes, our child has a birth certificate because most schools ask for a birth certificate during the school admission. However, we got our child registered with great difficulty because we did not know where to register, where to get the birth certificates from.’

Irrespective of their location or the level of their education, it is rare to find a parent or guardian who says that they do not want to register their children or that they believe that a birth certificate is of little use. Lack of awareness and information are often the reasons for their not having registered their children. But once made aware of the fact that they should always register the births, they respond with, ‘Now that I know it’s beneficial for my child’s well-being, I will surely try my best to get it for my child. After all, I’m a parent.’

On the other hand, some local registrars and registration functionaries at the district or the state level claim that families do not want to register the births because they do not see a birth certificate as a useful document. They argue that even if a family needs to prove the date of birth of their child, they can always pull out the school leaving certificate or get an affidavit from local authorities. In short, they believe that there is no demand. But what happens to children who have dropped out of school and have no school leaving certificates? Or to the children of uneducated parents who do not have the resources to obtain an affidavit from the local authorities?

It’s quite simple, really. While parents and guardians claim ignorance and authorities claim lack of demand for registration and certificates, the child stands to lose. And, more often than not, this child belongs to a poor uneducated family living in some remote village on the margins of society.

Were India to comply with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), Article 7 or, closer home, the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969, it would be clear that the onus of registration and certification lies with the state. The Handbook of Civil Registration clearly indicates that the Registrar is responsible for ‘informing the public of the necessity, procedures and requirements for effective registration and the value of vital statistics.’ Note, there is no mention of registration being about meeting a demand.

In India, an estimated 26 million births take place every year, of which approximately 9.4 million children go unregistered. There are in fact no figures as to how many of the children registered have birth certificates.

Typical as this may sound, the birth and death registration system in the country, like many other public service delivery systems, is weighed down by inherent systemic challenges such as low priority accorded to it. This low priority manifests itself in a number of ways, for example, there is virtually no annual budget allocation for registration work which affects supply and management of registration stationery, monitoring and supervision of field registration units, training, publicity, and so on.

However, in states and districts where the administration is concerned and convinced about registration, there has been an increase in overall levels of registration. For instance, take the case of Rajasthan, where from a birth registration rate of 46% in 2003, the figure increased to 65% in 2005 (latest available data from the state). An equally familiar story is the fact of huge inter-state disparities – states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala are at 90% registration while UP and Bihar show figures as low as 20%.

This is a classic example of the absence of political and administrative will. How else can one explain the failure to reach out to children with a service as basic as providing a birth certificate? Going by the general guidelines issued by the office of the Registrar General of India, the cost of providing an A4 size birth certificate of 70-80 gsm paper quality should cost one rupee at the maximum. So the cost can’t be the reason.

Though it is often claimed that such ambitious projects are not easily implemented in a country as large as India, birth registration and certification isn’t as uphill a task as it is made out to be. For instance, in a state as large as Madhya Pradesh, where approximately 1.9 million births take place every year, the local registrar at the village level has, on average, to register just 7-8 births per month! So what would it take to ensure that the information on birth registration and certification reaches every family, in every corner of the country? How will every single child get registered and receive a birth certificate?

In my opinion, all it calls for is translating the spirit of the RBD Act into action and implementing it, starting with filling vacancies of staff at all levels. We have to ensure that there are always sufficient registration supplies at the local registration unit. Registration functionaries should have the capacity and knowledge about the processes and procedures of registration. Monitoring systems have to be put into place so that the service is effective and efficient. We have to able to disseminate knowledge and information among parents and guardians and there has to be demand for vital statistics among planners, policy makers and administrators. But above all, we could start by just caring a little!

Bernadette Rai

 

Little eyes and a big screen

I saw Tara Rum Pum a few days ago with my five and a half year old son. His eyes were glued to the screen, his body tense at each race that led to its obvious foregone conclusion. I guess he loved the film or at least the experience of watching it. I, however, cannot say the same for myself. First of all, it’s set like most Bollywood films these days in NRI territory. It’s a world in which the kids have names like Champ and Princess and the family’s descent into poverty is presented to the kids as a reality TV show in order to protect them from the harsh truth that the family can no longer afford to live in upscale Manhattan and has to move to an all Asian neighbourhood instead. Perhaps this world does exist – somewhere. And I really don’t mind my kid watching it. What I mind is that there are hardly any other worlds for him to see on the big screen, or anywhere else for that matter. In this age of media explosion, the world is shrinking not just because of better connectivity but also because of exclusivity.

There are worlds, today, which children know nothing about. Kids are increasingly leading isolated lives in which their neighbourhoods, schools and entertainment zones are all peopled by others who, like them, can afford to pay for these spaces. Even their interaction with domestic help do not take them into the domestic workers’ world, unlike in earlier – albeit more feudal – arrangements. And so, in such a scenario, when our image making seems quite content not to venture into diverse terrains, it is but one more reflection of an inward looking psyche that inhibits those who wield the tools.

Movie watching for kids today is mainly about popular Hollywood and Bollywood cinema. Perhaps, Makdee (2002) was the last children’s film that came out of Bollywood that tried to present both reality and fantasy in a different way. For the most, it’s Simba and Nemo, Krrish and Tara Rum Pum. Entertainment that’s easily accessible for the consumer and easily marketable for the creator.

Kids are big business today. There are shops that cater exclusively to children, sometimes even exclusively to imported goods for children! There are birthday party organisers, speciality photo studios and workshops that promise to unleash all manner of creativity in kids. The world of the free market recognizes the huge amounts of revenue that can be generated by children. And so, it caters to them. But in this multiplex world where everything’s available for a price – education, experience, entertainment – are we really making a choice? What are we really choosing when we choose between Spiderman and Krrish? Between a birthday party at Nirula’s and one at McDonald’s?

A couple of weeks ago, at a workshop with children in the British Council Library on the theme of identity, I had three young boys articulate vehemently how they would shoot down a Pakistani on sight, once they had found a way to identify them. The good news is that the other children all jumped down on them and tried to argue otherwise. But it was a disturbing experience and left me thinking about what those kids had based their images of Pakistanis on? The answer is, of course, complex but surely intertwined in that complexity are the images produced by popular Bollywood films like Ghadar which, though not for children, are also being watched by them. While the world shrinks, borders also get reinforced, making it even more difficult for diversity to find it’s way into the projected light.

So, is the situation hopeless? As I write this, there are artists in Baroda who are fighting the fascism of moral policing. There is art being created today that is provoking and subversive and not everyone who wields the tools is inhibited. Image making and storytelling is still not all about uniformity and conformity. But it is a long and difficult battle in which children cannot but be a part of the arsenal. Diversity and plurality have to be experienced from childhood for them to become a part of the way we look at our world. So, children need to have access to diverse images and stories – on the big screen as well as in real life.

In the suburb where I live, there’s a well-maintained children’s park where I sometimes take my son. But to use the park’s facilities you have to be a member. And membership requires that you can prove you’re a resident of the suburb. So, the swings that work and the colourful slides in different shapes are effectively reserved for children from middle class families with paper identifications. How can these children know the images and stories of those children who have no papers to prove that they live here, even though they belong to families that migrated from distant villages to build the new shiny buildings in the suburb? That is as much a challenge for the big screen as for real life.

Samina Mishra