Carol Andrade column: The national emergency that is the rape of our children

Carol Andrade column: The national emergency that is the rape of our children

The superficiality of our anger cannot translate into compassion for our children, we betray them every time we choose to remain silent said Kailash Satyarthi

Carol AndradeUpdated: Saturday, June 15, 2019, 02:58 PM IST
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On Wednesday, Nobel Laureate and internationally acclaimed child activist Kailash Satyarthi, writing on the occasion of World Day against Child Labour, declared in an article aimed at Mumbaikars, “The superficiality of our anger cannot translate into compassion for our children. We betray them every time we choose to remain silent”.

He was referring to the terrifying numbers of children trafficked to Mumbai and used in a variety of ways; in hotels and dhabas and brothels. You see them all the time, as servants, as beggars and apprentice criminals, living on the streets or loitering at stations, bus stops and other public spaces. And seldom do we raise a voice of protest against what is happening.

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Which was ironic, because just the day before that, the most important news was the convictions and sentencing of accused in the infamous Kathua gang rape and murder of eight-year-old Asifa in January 2018. You remember it, right? The terrible anger, the demonstrations by civil society, the candle-light marches, the endless television debates, clashes among the legal fraternity, some of whom spoke for the accused! Eight people upon whom we looked with ghoulish horror, because, while maintaining the figleaf of legal anonymity, details of the brutality visited upon the innocent were swiftly made public.

All the better to keep us angry, of course. So now, for the present, it is over. Three sentenced to life, three to five years, one acquitted, one, a minor, will face trial by a special court a little later. There, eight accounted for, done and dusted. Except that the news of the trial’s conclusion took place against a continuous barrage of reporting of other child rapes, other murders, equally brutal. They have been literally pouring in from different part of the country, but mostly the north, particularly the Hindi belt of Madhya Pradesh and UP.

Kailash Satyarthi

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From Bhopal, Ujjain, and Jabalpur. From Meerut, Jalaun, Kushinagar, Hamirpur, Aligarh and Kanpur, some places that you would not have known existed, if it were not for the rape and murder of children being reported from there. Even as I write this, I know that there will be more and more, tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.

Because, as Mr. Satyarthi has said, child rape, abuse and violence are our national emergency. A number of factors feed into this situation – the polarisation of society along religious and caste lines, tremendous poverty, a judicial system that moves at a glacial pace, the rising use of social media allowing the perverts who prey upon children to film absolutely heinous acts and share them among the like-minded, the absence of adequate data entry of crime records and their monitoring.

I can go on – the presence of a deeply hierarchical society, the rise of indifference, the loss of empathy, the deadening of every decent impulse, the absorption in the consumer rat race, the absence of a national data base to record the existence (and the importance) of each and every child in this country, the third class position of women, the burgeoning presence of the ugliest forms or patriarchy.

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Ordinarily, the fact that the Kathua case was resolved so rapidly should have been cause for relief and self-congratulations. A little girl, used like a piece of garbage, then thrown aside, has received justice. Now to look at the estimated 40,000 cases that are expected to take place before this year winds up, if the past is a precedent.

Kailash Satyarthi got it right. If only India wakes to the real emergency it faces. Not national security, but the murder of thousands of its children by the wolves among us.

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