Child Protection Units

The answer, however, does not necessarily lie in summarily increasing the number of non-government organizations; there are already far too many of them in India which do not always walk their talk. Specially in the area of children where they tend to vanish when it comes to timely intervention and action for the suffering child. What use child-centred non-government organizations stuffed with paid staff and high-flying heads which appear to continue on the strength of their positive goals rather than on a systematic evaluation of their effectiveness? To whom, then, the greater good?

Also, not the answer is a ‘strategic alliance’ with the police; the very phrase conveys a cover-up of the actual issue, that the interests of a young citizen of India are not the concern of its police. There are, anyway, enough horror stories of how this ‘strategic alliance’ does nothing at all to help the child in distress. One example: a child cell set up in collaboration with a police station in a metropolitan city in India pleased that police commissioner because it did something for his caring image; it added importance to the non-government organization because the newspapers gave it publicity and this, in turn, got it more publicity as champions of the cause of the sexually abused child. What did it mean for this child who was forced into oral intercourse by her neighbour? Another neighbour saw this neighbour leaving while adjusting his fly, the little girl’s grandmother found her inside the flat gagging on the semen, the little girl’s family approached the police station and the policeman on duty, since he had been told that such child cases must be referred to the child cell, phoned the social workers concerned who took the usual amount of time in getting there, not intentionally long but long enough considering the travel time it takes in a large city. Meanwhile, the utterly distraught child and her parents waited. The ladies arrived and assisted in the filing of the first information report, a case was registered of molestation or outraging of modesty, and that was pretty much that. The ladies took their leave, the family was left to fend with its own feelings and return home to a situation where other neighbours, including the perpetrator’s family, had begun passing angry and loud comments about them going to the police for ‘such a matter’.

The social workers did not enter into discussion with the police or the family on what laws could be possibly applied quite simply because they were clueless on the laws of the land. It did not occur to any among them that they could approach any lawyer in the city who would have been happy to explain the relevant laws, and its pitfalls, to them. Oral sex with a child could have well been classified beyond ‘outraging of modesty’ which would get the accused a maximum of two years. It could have been classified as 377, an unnatural offence, 452 which is house trespass since he did it to the girl in her own flat and which would have got him up to seven years, or 511 which is attempt to rape.