Demography of Our Missing Children

What is the issue?

Instigating Whatsapp forwards against stereotyped child kidnappers is already creating havoc across rural pockets in the nation.
Further, it a serious distraction from the actual statistics of missing children in India, which currently stands at about 174 per day.

What is the current scenario?

Statistics - “National Crime Records Bureau” (NCRB) states that 63,407 children went missing in 2016 alone, which implies an average of 174 per day.
More disquietingly, about 50% of the children who have gone missing until 2016 have stayed untraced thus far.
But the stories behind the statistics are complex, sometimes counterintuitive, and vastly different from what ‘child lifting’ rumours on social media claim.
The Stories - It could be a 17-year-old girl who elopes with her lover, and her family back home reports her as ‘kidnapped’.
It could be a neighbour promising a job for a young boy but instead enslaving him in a factory, or a kid who runs away from an abusive father.
Sometimes, it could just be a star-struck girl boarding a train to see her favourite actor in a big city and getting lost there.
Fear of exams, family fights and corporal punishments are also other significant aspects that cause children to go missing.

What is the general flow of a kidnapping case (through an example)?

Job Lure - A 12 year old boy was offered a decent job in Delhi by his neighbour in rural Bihar, and the boy set out for it with his parent’s consent.
But soon, the parents lost trace of the boy and their neighbour and decided to file a police complaint in this regard.
Official Nexus - While the investigations got along, the parents were initially persuaded to withdraw the case for a monetary compensation by some people.
When the parents of the boy stayed insistent on tracing their ward, the police too started getting uncooperative and even threatened them.
Persistence – Nonetheless, the parents persisted and set out for Delhi to get clues of about their boy, and subsequently sought the help of NGOs.
Pressure from Delhi-based NGO “Bachpan Bachao Andolan” (BBA), forced a police crackdown on child traffickers and led to the rescue of 16 children.
While the missing kid wasn’t traced in Delhi, subsequent massive search efforts led to his rescue from Haridwar.
Trauma - He is now back home with his parents, but continues to be deeply traumatised by the experience.
He hasn’t been able to say how he reached Haridwar or what transpired at the factory except that he saw other children being beaten.
Nonetheless, this was a case of happy ending, but many of those abducted disappear without a trace.

How is police apathy affecting investigations?

The longer the police take to trace the lost child, the less likely is the chances of locating him and hence investigations need to start off swiftly if a child is lost.
Supreme Court ordered in 2013 that the police should mandatorily register an FIR of kidnapping when they receive a missing child complaint.
But police continue to remain hesitant and the parents are persuaded to by them to believe that the kid has merely run away and would come back.
Due to such attitudes, precious lead time is waste and the child could well be out of the State before investigation begins.
Case - A 14 year old girl from rural Maharashtra went missing and the parents had approached the police immediately.
Further, they even spelt out the name of a suspect, but the police did paltry little to trace the girl or to interrogate the suspect.
While the girl had left indeed left willingly with the person suspected by her parents, she was then subjected to intense sexual and physical abuse by him.
After 8 months of the ordeal, the girl finally managed to get hold of a mobile phone to ring back home and convey her whereabouts.

What are the other interesting aspects of the statistics?

Girls between 12 and 18 accounts for 66% of the 54,328 children reported as kidnapped in 2016, but this is likely to be an overestimation.
This is because a lot of romantic relationships are reported as kidnapping by parents who don’t approve of the relationship.
A study of 2,000 cases in Delhi and Mumbai under the POCSO Act found a significant number of cases were consensual sexual relationships.
Courts in such cases tend to acquit the accused on charges of rape, but convict them for kidnapping, which is adding to the pile of kidnapping cases.
In a case in Tamil Nadu, a 15 year old boy ran away from home to liberate himself from the harsh and problematic family members.
Hence, it can be said that not all children in the ‘missing’ database have been trafficked and some step out of their homes voluntarily to lead a different life.
Nonetheless, it is the duty of the state to ensure that the child is safe and secure in his/her newly chosen environment and gets her due childhood.

What is the way ahead?

Greater coordination between child welfare bodies and police is vital to bring down the rate of disappearances and increase the percentage of retracing kids.
Police reform, capacity building and trained human resources to crack these cases and effective tracking of distress calls could also better the cause.
Delhi police have commissioned facial recognition features to identify and track missing kids, and nationwide database has been setup for the same.
While these are positives, educating our children on safety and counselling parents for bettering their parenting techniques also needs to be furthered.

Source: The Hindu