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Abused Tamil kids fight for their rights
A seven-year-old boy was made to stand for an hour under a blistering sun and later suspended for wearing henna on his hands while a case of rioting was registered against a three-year-old. Several children like them in Tamil Nadu are now fighting legal battles to secure their rights.
Horror stories of mental and physical abuse of children by authority figures poured out at a public hearing by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) last week.
The commission heard 45 rights violation cases, 12 of which had ended in death.
Seven-year-old Kaushik Ram had playfully applied henna on his hands as he had seen his female relatives do and was intrigued by the decoration on the women’s palms.
His teachers at the 150-year-old Doveton Corrie group of schools considered it a crime. The little boy was made to stand in the middle of the school playground for an hour in the blistering sun, fined Rs.500 ($12) and suspended.
His parents, both lawyers, took him away from the school and went to the media with their complaint.
Commission chairperson Santha Sinha said: “This cannot be a standalone incident. The education department should investigate what punishment the school doles out to other students too.”
Another child, Prabhakaran Swaminathan from a Tuticorin school, complained that his math teacher had struck him so hard with an iron ruler that he had to be taken to hospital.
S. Sevaraj, from a school in Tirunelveli, described how he was made to kneel for the whole day and shamed before his schoolmates for allegedly changing his marks in an exam paper.
The commission also heard how police had filed a case of rioting against five-year-old Subhash and three-year-old Subhakar, children of a Dalit family in Tuticorin district.
The village administrative officer filed complaints against the children and the police then named them in a criminal case.
Police and education authorities across India are supposed to register complaints related to child abuse of all kinds.
However, in many cases that came up at the daylong public hearing, no complaint had been registered and in many cases the education department had never heard of the violations before.
At the end of the hearings, an exasperated Sinha said: “I do not understand why most of the cases are registered under Section 306 (abetment of suicide in the Indian Penal Code) and not 302 (attempt to murder).”
“Police should be defenders of children, not of the school authorities,” Sinha added.
The NCPCR also heard two children from the Sevalaya Mahakavi Bharatiyar Higher Secondary School near Chennai. The school that provides free education to orphans and children from poor families has been in the eye of a storm in recent months with the kids alleging sexual abuse and ill treatment by teachers.
German NGO Yoga-Vereingung-Rajagopalan (YVR) made allegations of sexual abuse of children at this school towards the end of last year. They were supported by the Indian Council for Child Welfare, which said it had received a Child Line help call from a student of Sevalaya.
“These children are vulnerable as they come from poor families. This is the only school they have. It is only natural that they are scared to talk against the school,” an ICCW representative told the media.
The NCPCR said that since there were many complaints against the school, the commission would involve the state government in its initiatives.
Children at a Dalit welfare home complained that they were beaten and forced to clean school toilets and fetch water from two kilometres away.
Sinha said no judgement should be made on the “seriousness of the cases” as all forms of abuse of children are equal in the eyes of the law.
Vasanthi Devi, a rights activist and former university vice-chancellor who was part of the commission’s jury, said: “Just transferring a teacher with a history of abusing children is not a solution to the problem. The Tamil Nadu government needs to tackle the issue head on and deal with it differently.”
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