Some of India's child rights issues

I know I have not really referred to issues concerning child rights yet, so maybe now is the time to just mention some of the issues which organisations deal with here in India. In India, children’s vulnerabilities and exposure to violations of their protection rights remain spread and multiple in nature. The manifestations of these violations are various, ranging from child labour, child trafficking, to commercial sexual exploitation and many other forms of violence and abuse. With an estimated 12.6 million children engaged in hazardous occupations (2001 Census), for instance, India has the largest number of child labourers under the age of 14 in the world. Although poverty is often cited as the cause underlying child labour, other factors such as discrimination, social exclusion, as well as the lack of quality education or existing parents’ attitudes and perceptions about child labour and the role and value of education need also to be considered. In states like Bihar, Mizoram, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, 60 per cent or more girls dropped out before completing their five years primary education.
Trafficking of children also continues to be a serious problem in India. The nature and scope of trafficking range from industrial and domestic labour, to forced early marriages and commercial sexual exploitation. Existing studies show that over 40 per cent of women sex workers enter into prostitution before the age of 18 years. Moreover, for children who have been trafficked and rescued, opportunities for rehabilitation remain scarce and reintegration process arduous.
While systematic data and information on child protection issues are still not always available, evidence suggests that children in need of special protection belong to communities suffering disadvantage and social exclusion such as scheduled casts and tribes, and the poor. The lack of available services, as well as the gaps persisting in law enforcement and in rehabilitation schemes also constitute a major cause of concern.

Parents often mutilate their children, i.e. they scratch out their eyes, break and twist their arms and legs, and so on, hoping the children will then be able to raise more money begging. Furthermore, giving these children money doesn't help the children. Children often operate in neighbourhood gangs and in the evening they are called to see their neighbourhood lord. The lord will then collect all the money they earned begging and he might give them 10% of that amount. Children living in homes are often sexually, verbally and physically abused and are forced to do hazardous work. Furthermore, children are picked by the police during raides and the put in a juvenile home until their fate is decided by an arbitrary judge. Often these children have not committed any crime but they are taken into custody by the police, because the police cannot find the real perpetrators and they have to reach their quota. And often it is the police themselves who abuse these children for their own sexual gratification. In addition, girl children are frequently not really seen as children. It is better to bare boys. Although prohibited by law nowadays, people still tend to use pre-conception and pre-natal diagnostic techniques to find out the gender of their baby. And all too often women have an abortion when they find out they are having a girl. Hence, India's girl child is actually vanishing. Another issue which is well-known are the so-called child marriages where a girl child is married off to an older man at a very young age. Being on the train I once saw a girl, who must have been about 14, breast feeding her baby. It is quite confronting and it is hard to imagine our lives could have been so much different, having 5 children at the age of 19. How lucky we are........ On the trains you also often find 5 or 6 year olds selling things. There is not much prospect for them for the future and they are likely to follow in their parent's footsteps lacking any education, which currently is free and compulsory up to the age of 14 years. The problem is the lack of motivation.

Another major issue is the spread of HIV/AIDS. With an estimated 4.58 million HIV positive cases, India has the second largest number of people in the world living with HIV. This accounts for 11.4 per cent of global HIV infections. The epidemic is unevenly distributed across India, with just six states accounting for 80 per cent of the estimated cases: Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Manipur, Nagaland and Tamil Nadu. In these states, the HIV prevalence rate among women attending antenatal clinics exceeds 1 per cent – an indication that the epidemic has spread from high-risk groups, such as sex workers and injecting drug users, to the general population. The main mode of HIV transmission is through sexual contact. The exception is in the north-eastern states of Manipur and Nagaland, where injecting drug use accounts for the majority of the transmission.

What to say about diseases caused by the polluted water? An estimated 400,000 children under five years of age die each year due to diarrhoea. Several million more suffer from multiple episodes of diarrhoea and still others fall ill on account of Hepatitis A, enteric fever, intestinal worms and eye and skin infections caused by poor hygiene and unsafe drinking water. Despite the Government and UNICEF’s best efforts, diarrhoea remains the major cause of death amongst children, after respiratory- tract infections. Unhygienic practices and unsafe drinking water are some of its main causes. More than 122 million households in the country are without toilets. Even though toilets are built in about 3 million households every year, the annual rate of increase has been a low 1 per cent in the past decade.

Just a quick note on some of the women's issues. They have so-called kitchen accidents. These accidents occur when a husband finds that his wife has not provided him with enough dowry. In order to get more dowry they set the woman on fire. If she lives, she has to flee the house and live the rest of her life in shame. If she dies, the husband can marry another woman and claim dowry for a second time. Not a women's issue but just something that popped into my head and which is worth mentioning here(no mind you, I am not trying to scare you and I respect all religions and people, these are just facts stated here. Which you can literally find on the UNICEF website) is the fact that Hindu's often kidnap children and sacrifice them to the Gods. I don't know too much about all this, but there are quite inhuman practices over here :S At the moment there is a lot of reporting on a major killing up north. Apparently 17 children have been abused, tortured and killed in Noida. The story is just too grewsome to mention here. They are now investigating whether besides abducting the children to abuse them, they were then killed for the sale of their organs, since all that was left were their limbs and skulls. However, police inaction is one of the main reasons why this horrific situation wasn't discovered sooner.

I won't bother you with more issues right now, as I think this will already provide you with quite an elaborate reality check.