On 17 January, a Class 1 student was injured when he was allegedly attacked with a sharp-edged weapon in the toilet of a private school in Lucknow. The case is the latest in a string of crimes committed on children that have made headlines of late. In September 2017, seven-year-old Pradyumn Thakur was found lying in a pool of blood in a washroom in another private school.
Is crime against children on a rise? National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) 2016 records hold the answer. Lucknow ranks fifth in the country for crimes against children, with Delhi topping the charts and Mumbai on the second position.
The statistics paint a disturbing picture of India’s metropolitan cities when it comes to the safety of our children. Schools are no longer as safe as they were once perceived to be, while horror stories of children being unsafe in both homes as well as on the streets continue to make headlines.
According to the NCRB data, over 19,000 cases of crimes against children were reported in 2016 from the top 19 metropolitan cities – including crimes like child trafficking and abetment of suicide.
Priyanka Kanoongo, a member of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights told Scroll that there are at least 18 separate Central laws and guidelines (including some national ones) governing safety of children across the country. In addition, state governments, including that of Delhi have issued their own guidelines regulating safety, especially in schools. Now that begs a few questions:
- If there are laws, why is there such faulty implementation?
- Is there enough awareness among parents and schools across India regarding laws guarding children?
- Are societal prejudices causing parents to turn a blind eye to the signs of harassment or sexual abuse?
A thousand other questions can be asked here, to the authorities as well as parents and caretakers. But it is important to understand that those who commit these crimes continue to take advantage of the innocence of the child.
As Chandrashekar SV – of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Rani Channamma University, Karnataka – states in research on crimes against children in India, published in the International Research Journal of Social Sciences journal:
Children are so innocent in nature; this innocence can be misused by others.Especially, when offences take place it is shameful, and society hates it. There is threat in the mind set of society members, which impacts on parents psychologically as well as socially.
The shocking numbers revealed by the NCRB only aggravate the worries of parents across the country, especially in the metropolitan cities. In a country where sex education is still a taboo, it’s high time that schools introduce subjects to educate children about their own safety, both within and outside the school premises.
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