Saving children

Any civilised nation should be concerned about the plight of its children, and may be rightly expected to rise as one man when abuse of children reaches its peak.

The food would be cold and would be given to her on a piece of plastic while she was tied up in the bath. She would eat it like a dog, pushing her face to the plate. Except, of course that a dog is not usually tied up in a plastic bag full of its excrement. To say that Kouao and Manning treated Victoria like a dog would be wholly unfair; she was treated worse than a dog.

Neil Garnham QC at the Lord Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Klembie of Ivory Coast in London (February 2000).

Now we have the Noida murder near Delhi where a dentist father, the police claim, murdered his own daughter. According to one press report, a leading United Kingdom charity, Save the Children, has alleged that peacekeepers and aid workers operating in some parts of Africa, such as Ivory Coast and southern Sudan, have been guilty of extensive sexual abuse of children. Actually, one victim, a girl of 13, has told the British Broadcasting Corporation of how she was gang-raped by about 10 members of the United Nations peace-keeping force and abandoned near her home in Ivory Coast.

Save the Children wants a global watchdog to monitor the conduct of U.N. forces deployed in strife-torn areas. All of a sudden, much to our dismay and horror, newspapers and the rest of the media seem to be full of stories of abuse of children, sexually and otherwise. The National Crime Records Bureaus (NCRB) Crime in India tells us that in 2006, as many as 4,721 children were raped (a 17 per cent rise over the previous year) and 5,102 were abducted or kidnapped (a 45 per cent increase). These are just reported cases. Given the dubious record of the Indian police, how many cases went unreported is anybodys guess.

Any civilised nation should be concerned about the plight of its children, and may be rightly expected to rise as one man when abuse of children reaches its peak. I strongly believe that we are now riding the crest of a wave of barbarity against children. If we do not nurse the children in our community, individually and collectively, the very rationale of our existence is on shaky grounds, and posterity will not forgive us.

Recently, I attended a two-day conference in Goa on child safety, so thoughtfully organised by the Childrens Rights Goa (CRG), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) devoted to the task of leading many significant initiatives to improve child care. This was a conference with a difference. Free from empty rhetoric and shibboleths, the participants, opinion leaders and social workers with hands-on experience in dealing with children who had been wronged by society, spoke with clarity and passion. The tone for discussions was set by director Nishtha Desai who was confident that the scene could change if only there was a will not merely among the political executive but in the community as well.

A soft-spoken yet determined leader of a commendable movement to protect children from a variety of abuses, Nishtha Desai represents a small group of selfless workers who labour tirelessly to keep the focus on child victims in the country. They operate under spartan conditions and depend on the munificence of organisations that not only have resources but the intellect and heart which tell them that issues like child safety may not be left entirely to governments and that they need the building of public opinion and arousal of community conscience, an exercise that costs money. The Goa conference was funded by the U.K. India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI).

An active participant was Inspector Laura Jeffrey of the Metropolitan Police, London, with whom many of us had delightful rounds of conversation. Laura, who heads one of the 19 child protection units at the Metropolitan Police, told us of how the U.K. had come a long way from those murky days of the past when, despite strong legislation, child abuse was routine and stirred few in the country.

She related a story that was most poignant and touching. This was the case of Victoria Klembie, an Ivory Coast girl of 14, whose poverty-stricken parents handed her over to a distant aunt, Marie Kouao, for being taken to France in the hope she would receive better care, especially since she was in delicate health. After a short spell in France, Kouao took her to England in early 1999 where they lived in a north-western suburb of London. Soon Kouao got the job of a cleaner in a hospital. The move to London from Paris was possibly also to exploit U.K.s social security system, which offered better terms to a family with children. But then, looking after a sickly child such as Victoria was too much of a burden for a heartless single woman. Naturally, the girl was neglected and treated harshly, except that Kouao hired a child minder to give some part-time attention to Victoria who suffered from acute incontinence. Things became worse when Kouao acquired a boy friend, Carl Manning, a London bus driver.

The couple did not fancy tending a girl who was ill most of the time. They were brutal to Victoria and subjected her to physical abuse of the most abominable kind. They used things such as a bicycle chain, belt buckle and hammer to inflict pain all over the childs body. Ironically, Victoria did not wilt; nor did she complain. Things came to a head when Victoria became critically ill, and it was the daughter of her child minders kindness that enabled her to go to a hospital for treatment. It was tragic that the hospital did not intimate the police of the injuries that Victoria bore all over her body. Nor did they notify any social service agency.

A social worker and a member of the Metropolitans Child Protection unit who saw Victoria at the hospital were falsely led to believe that the injuries were accidental. They did not also visit Victorias home to check on facts. It was this callousness on the part of agencies that should have protected her which ultimately led to her death in February 2000 from hypothermia. The Home Office pathologist who examined the body reported 128 injuries, most of them weapon-inflicted. The Metropolitan Police woke up too late when they arrested Kouao and Manning for child neglect. The couple convicted to life for murder and child neglect-related charges are now in jail.

The Victoria Klembie case shook the nations conscience. The government quickly instituted an inquiry under Lord Laming who, in a forthright report, bemoaned the total failure of a much-touted child welfare system. His report led to a new programme, Every Child Matters and a new law, the Children Act, 2004, which replaced the law of 1989. The objective of the 2004 legislation is to integrate all the services available to a child under the direction of a Childrens Commissioner for England. According to Jeffrey, the present system works reasonably well, with the police playing a key role.

The Indian scenario has quite a few disturbing features. I would look upon female infanticide as the foremost of obnoxious practices that have gained root, especially in the rural setting. It is an evil beyond words and a blot on our system. All propaganda in favour of the girl child seems to have been futile, if one recalls the recent unsavoury episode in a Chennai hospital, where a mix-up led to the comical sight of two sets of parents claiming the male baby and disowning the girl born about the same time. The sex ratio imbalance is widening by the day. It is likely to result in myriad problems in society. Abandoned, runaway and missing children, child rape and murder and child labour are all realities of a situation whose gravity does not sink into us amidst the rat race in which we are involved to pursue our own personal agenda. All these cry for a massive national exercise.

Bureaucracy in the form of a National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights, the Ministry of Women and Child Development and a host of State government agencies is inevitably dominant. Chronicling what it does and what it omits to do can be a painful exercise. The point, however, is enlightened citizenship can hardly allow things to slip in this vital area and it is incumbent on it to audit the performance of all those claiming to serve the interests of the child.

Our main legislation is the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act of 2000 which was amended in 2006. It has two components: on how to deal with children in conflict with law, and how to look after children in need of care and protection.

Many critics of the Act say that it has not produced the desired impact on the attitudes of government and bodies appointed by it. For instance, many States have not framed the required rules under the Act and have also not constituted the Juvenile Justice Board. The Act contemplates a child protection unit in every district, which again is a body that exists only on paper. This came in for some amount of criticism at the Goa conference. What was more evident on the occasion was the dissatisfaction over police insensitivity to abuse of children. The handling of cases of child rape in particular left much to be desired. As one participant said, policewomen sometimes wrongly assume medical knowledge that they do not actually possess, and hence do not recognise it when a child is raped. As a result, a victim child who has definitely been wronged is sometimes turned away.

In the case of juvenile delinquency, there is the salutary provision that no juvenile should be lodged in jails meant for adults. Instances of this rule being violated are also many. A complaint heard at the Goa conference was that some police officers fudge the age of a child so as to send him or her to an adult jail where, unlike in juvenile homes, questioning is easier. This is a serious allegation that should invite the attention of the judiciary and senior police officers. There was in sum the feeling that the police in India were not being adequately trained to investigate offences against children. The suggestion is that such training should possibly be accompanied by the statutory framing of a protocol that would clearly lay down the drill on how to investigate cases of child abuse, once an offence is established.

I was most impressed by two publications circulated at the conference: Child Sexual Abuse in Goa by Nishtha Desai and others, and Justice for Children by Nina Nayak and others. These contain a wealth of information that will be of great interest to those who want to study problems associated with protecting our children. For me it was great learning to hear down-to-earth and honest analyses of a situation that is showing signs of going out of control.

How I wish some of our law-makers were present in Goa. Is it not fundamental that child care transcends controversies and narrow political objectives? Should not the political executive spend some time once in a while to check where we are heading in an area that is of paramount importance to building our image as a nation that cares for its children?