BAREFOOT
The child in need
HARSH MANDER
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For a country with one of the world’s highest child populations, India invests too little in their welfare. And it shows in the children who are ‘looked after’ by the State.
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Photo: Shanker Chakravarty
They deserve better...
There are millions of children who cannot, for a variety of reasons, be protected by their parents and adult family. They may be dead, or alcoholic, or violent and abusive, or in jail, or lost, or have abandoned their child. The parents may also be t
hemselves destitute, homeless, gravely ill or disabled, and therefore unable to care for their children without support. The child who has no home or settled place or abode and any ostensible means of subsistence may be at risk in other ways as well: due to riots, natural disasters, war and militant conflict; disabilities and incurable terminal ailments, with no one who can support or look after the child; when a child is grossly abused, tortured or sexually exploited; is inducted into drug abuse or trafficking; child marriage and child labour.
In all such situations, it is the State which is both morally and legally responsible to protect, nurture and raise each child. However, at present, the State in India invests miniscule resources in child protection. India today is a youthful nation: 19 per cent of the children in the world live within its boundaries, and more than one-third of the population is below 18 years. But the State spent less than five per cent of its budget in 2006-07 on children, mainly for education and healthcare. Accounting for the largest number of children in work; sexually abused children and the second largest number of children affected by HIV, India arguably has the highest number of children facing exploitation and neglect in the world. But the investment on child protection was a shocking 0.034 per cent of the budget.
Traditionally, public authorities have tried to accomplish their duty of protecting children who are at risk mainly by locking away large numbers of these children in State-run, closed institutions for many years until the child grows to adulthood, and soon after the child comes of age by abruptly discharging the child without any further support into the larger society. Private and religious charities also sometimes run orphanages for such children, but they are usually run on similar custodial principles of raising the child in confined and overly disciplined environments. For children who conflict with the law, there are statutory “special homes” to which they are usually confined in conditions similar to jails. For many years, these children also shared adult jails, and many illegally continue to do so.
Threatening environment
Children who have been brought up in various State homes routinely describe these as “children’s jails”, or sometimes chillar jails (chillar means “small change”). Even though the confined children are physically provided for — food, clothes, schooling, medicines — they rebel against the loveless environments intrinsic to all institutions. Many street youth testify to spending their entire childhoods being captured and then running away from one or the other institutions. Children regard incarceration in such homes as a punishment. Cut off from the larger community, behind their opaque walls, corruption and institutionalised systems of bullying and sexual and physical abuse are known to pervade these homes. The children raised in these homes are typically withdrawn or violent, and find it hard to integrate with the larger world into which they are ejected as soon as the State is not bound by the law to protect them.
It is both absurd and heartless for children to be locked up only because they have no one to protect them. It is argued that this is done for the sake of the child: if the child was free in the community, the State would be unable to protect the child from abuse, and therefore she is locked up for her own good. This is as illogical as saying that when a woman is gang-raped, and the State is unable to arrest her tormentors, instead they lock her up for her own safety. The State must find ways to protect the child who is in need of care in ways that respect the child’s right to a happy and free childhood, while at the same time ensuring her protection, and her rights to food, education, health care, recreation, love and security.
The State in India first accepted the legal responsibility to look after children who lack responsible adult protection almost a century back, in the 1920s, when the first Children’s Acts were enacted in Madras and Bombay presidencies. But although the theoretical premise of such colonial legislation was to provide vulnerable children care and protection by the State, its language and provisions were overlaid with the bias that the child who is deprived of family care is “bad”, or at least potentially bad, hence they need to be safely locked up, for the sake of the larger society as much as the child. This attitude still defines the practice of our law for vulnerable children almost a century later, and their continued preference for locking up children even when the law does not require it.
Meaningless distinction
Later in 1960, the Parliament enacted a central law, the Children’s Act, to safeguard the children from abuse and exploitation. At present, the legal framework of child protection stems mainly from the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000. The law makes an important (but arguable) distinction between children who are “in need of care and protection” and those who are “in conflict with the law”. In fact, all children need care and protection, even if they are in conflict with the law. Separating the two and enacting different ways of dealing with these two categories of children, strengthens the stigmatising of children who are charged with an offence.
It is welcome, even if very belated, that the Government of India formulated a comprehensive Integrated Child Protection Scheme which seeks to address many of these limitations to its programmes of child protection, including the “overbearing” focus on institutional services.
Lingering limitation
One limitation of even the new scheme is that it does not provide alternatives to closed, jail-like institutions in which children in conflict with the law are still held, in which the child is isolated from his family and the community, and is deprived of humane treatment, recreation, childhood, counselling and rehabilitative services. We should not isolate such children in conflict with the law from their families and the community, we should not criminalise such children, but instead we should take active steps for the remedy of social, psychological and family causes which led the child to act in conflict with the law, to counsel, educate, support and rehabilitate the child so that after reaching adulthood, the child is able to function as a happy, law-abiding citizen.
However, for all other children who are in need and at risk, the scheme reiterates that the “best interests of the child” requires that institutionalisation should be only the last resort, and the rule should be of taking care of the child in the family or community. It seeks to prevent children from falling into difficult circumstances, by identifying and supporting families in which children are vulnerable. If a child is endangered because of extreme poverty of the family, it provides for sponsorship of the child with a monthly grant for care within the family. It also provides for universalising Childline, to create a national database and 24/7 emergency service to link children in difficulty to emergency and long-term care and rehabilitation services.
Even for children who need to be separated from their families, or have been abandoned or have lost their families, it strengthens alternatives like foster care, in which single women or couples are supported to provide foster care to these children in supervised and supported family units. For street children it provides for open shelters extending comprehensive care.
Although this Integrated Child Protection Scheme — which would be a great step ahead for our vulnerable children — was approved in principle at the start of the 11th Plan by the Planning Commission, it has still not been approved by the cabinet even after two years have passed of the Plan period. Its budget of 1,000 crore rupees is a significant advance over the paltry allocations of the past, but is still meagre for an estimated 100 million children who are gravely at risk. The government has been unable to converge resources such as of education and labour departments, therefore it will still not enable, for instance, the several hundred open shelters and foster care homes required for street children in every major city.
Even so, the Integrated Child Protection Scheme marks a significant step ahead for our development as a humane polity. Any people can be judged by the way it treats individuals who are most powerless and vulnerable. Among these are children in need and in imminent risk because they have no responsible adult to take care of them. For too long have law makers, State authorities, civil right activists, and development workers ignored the neglect and abuse of these children within the contemporary statutory and budgetary framework in India. It is something that we all, in partnership, can and should change. It can brook no further delay.
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