In a dramatic viral video, surfaced on July 22 from an Eastern Delhi neighborhood, a mother can be seen fighting for her 4-year-old daughter in order to release her from the grapple of two-kidnappers in broad daylight.
Thanks to the bravery of the mother and two of her neighbors, not only has the child been rescued but also were the culprits caught. As the netizens reacted to the video as ‘nightmarish’ for parents, it paves the way for broader conversations owing to the sad state of India’s girl children.
Whatever the exact motivation behind the kidnapping effort may be, the ill-intentions of the miscreants in violating the girl child cannot be clearer.
A report titled ‘Against My Will – Defying The Practices That Harm Women And Girls’, published by The United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) on June 30, highlights the ‘harmful practices’ across the world that banish women and girls from reaching their ‘full potential’.
“Every day, hundreds of thousands of girls around the world are subjected to practices that harm them physically or psychologically, or both, with the full knowledge and consent of their families, friends, and communities,” the report elucidates.
It also underlines the heightened risks amid the Covid-19 pandemic, though not enough data could have been gathered by now. Besides the delayed implementation of various national and international remedies to these harmful practices, “pandemic-related economic disruptions are increasing the vulnerability of girls to harmful coping mechanisms,” the report mentions.
Among the three widespread harmful practices specified by the report, child marriage and son preference are considered to be rampant in the Indian context, although the list of evils is far from being exhausted with these two.
While children in this country face numerous vulnerabilities due to their tender age, the risks are undoubtedly even graver for our girls. Rumbling over four-issue areas that hamper our girls from realizing their full potential as a woman, may widen the horizon of our discourse.
Son Preference
Seeped into the Indian psyche remains son preference for explicit socio-cultural reasons. The latest UNFPA report indicates among the 142 million girls that have gone missing worldwide due to gender-based sex selection, 4.6 crore alone went missing at birth in India as of 2020. After China, India records the second-highest number of missing girls in the world.
It is even startling that in India, every 50 seconds a girl child is killed by their parents. The report also indicates the fact that between 2011 and 2013, 110 boys are born per 100 girls.
“While 5 lakh COVID-19 deaths worldwide are causing such a furor, there is not a word from the streets to the parliaments on 460 lakh deaths of girls in the country, which is intentional,” feminist activist Kamla Bhasin says.
While the reasons allude to considering girls as liabilities in dire economic conditions of rural India, the declining urban sex ratio of the country suggests otherwise. Since the technological innovation of ultrasound machines in the 1980s, rates of abortions based on the sex-based selection are higher in urban set-ups. There are even portable ultrasound machines available to be used in temporary, volatile clinics in rural areas.
Despite the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act of 1994 criminalizing pre-natal sex determination, the illegal practices of it continued, though the rates have declined substantially.
“Data from the 2011 census reveal that relatively prosperous states like Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, and Maharashtra have a very bad child sex ratio, whereas some of the lesser developed regions like Chhattisgarh and northeastern states have a much better child sex ratio,” sociologist Pramil Kumar Panda tells DW. Bhasin also blamed “the patriarchal mindset that property cannot go to the daughter” for the rampant son preferences among the educated and affluent.
On the one hand, daughters are terminated, deserted, buried alive, poisoned, stoned and strangulated to death, and even left to die of starvation and infections. On the other, they are hailed as mothers and goddesses. The paradox of this Indian mentality lies in the patriarchal imagination of India’s female figures, mired with the notions of modesty, meekness, piety and, subservience.
The dire economic conditions amid the pandemic that has hit the countries impoverished the most may be adding to this Indian psyche in want of more boys who are considered relatively economically viable as potential rural laborers and dowry earners.
Child Marriage
Child marriage, involving either or both the contracting parties being a child (as per the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 below 18 and 21 years for girls and boys, respectively, have been specified), in India between 2005 and 2019 stands at the rate of 27 percent.
Despite considerable progress being made in India for curbing the practice with a 50 percent decline accounted for the entire South Asian context, the Indian scenario is far from being cured.
It was not until late 2017 that the Supreme Court of India criminalized sex with minor brides who were till then considered to be under the legal protection of the adult men having a non-consensual sexual relationship with their minor wives. “Under no circumstance, can a child below 18 years of age give consent, express or implied, for sexual intercourse,” the judgment noted, declaring sex with a minor wife tantamount to rape.
The noxious combination of poverty, unawareness, social compulsion of marriage, and skewed gender dynamics of penurious India is majorly responsible for culminating the ills of child marriage. Under the illusive assumption that the groom’s family is responsible for her care and an incentive of spending smaller dowry amounts for marrying off tender age girls, poor parents end up taking such measures.
The crooked sex-ratio in India that culminates into the dearth of eligible brides leading to trades of brides, makes minor girls from poor families its perfect victims. These girls are traded off for even the negligible bride prices paid by the groom’s families.
Trafficking
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) published research brief dated May 14 implies the likely increase in cross-border trafficking and human smuggling amid the corona-pandemic. The report shows the global economic slowdown exacerbating unemployment in many countries as a result of the measures of Covid-19 diffusion taken by respective governments to have produced the perfect stage for trafficking.
While internal migration rates are higher from lower to higher income states of India, many of these workers render homeless. Without identification documents, these workers are not only unable to access basic social services but also children of these workers are left vulnerable and mostly unattended at the precarious work sites.
The Global Slavery Index extrapolating from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) suggests that out of the total 15,379 people trafficked in 2016, 9,034 were below the age of 18 and out of the total 23,117 people rescued from trafficking situations 14,183 were minors.
Many of these trafficked minors are assigned for forced labor, child marriages and are subjected to sexual exploitation. While trafficking of boys for sexual abuse and child labor is not unheard of, girl children especially belonging to marginalized communities are at greater risk of being trafficked.
“All I had to do was deliver young girls from the village and I would make Rs 20,000 to Rs 50,000 for each,” confessed 22-year-old Farakh Ali Gayen who made a living out of kidnapping and selling girls in a human trafficking racket of West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district that was busted in 2017.
Reports indicate more than 90 percent of those trafficked for sex to be the tender age girls and 90 percent of trafficking in India as internal with the survivors belonging to most of India’s impoverished states. Approximately, 40 percent of the total number of sex workers (1.2 million) in India are minors and 75 percent of those minors have been trafficked.
Sexual Exploitation
Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) can be briefly defined as “the involvement of a child in sexual activity that he or she does not fully comprehend, is unable to give informed consent to.” A systematic review of 55 research studies based on 24 countries concluded the overall rates of CSA to range from 8 to 31 percent for females and from 3 to 17 percent for males.
In India, approximately, 109 children were sexually abused each day, reveals the National Crime Record Bureau, indicating a 22 percent rise in such cases from 2017. The rates are equally alarming for both the sexes.
In fact, a study suggests young Indian boys may have an almost similar or occasionally higher prevalence of CSA as compared to girls and it is owing to the misleading norms of masculinity often vulnerabilities among boys go unnoticed.
Nonetheless, the rate of CSA among girls ranging between 4 and 41 percent remains the focus of this discussion. When it comes to sexual abuse that is tantamount to rape, the numbers of female survivors are much higher. Out of the total 21,605 child rapes recorded in 2018, 21,401 were girls and 204 boys.
Unfortunately, 40 percent of the child sexual offenders are reported to be previously known to the survivor. Three-months within the lockdown at least five cases of fathers raping their minor girls across India have been reported in media and the numbers that went unreported are feared to be more. The case of abduction, rape and, eventual murder of 8-year-old Asifa in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kathua district is also a vivid reminder of child exploitation being used as a mode of communal vendetta.
The above-mentioned four areas of discussion pertaining to the well-being of India’s girl children are in fact intertwined while feeding into each other. Whereas these are specified problems, the root cause lies at the blatant structure of Indian patriarchy coupled with pressing socio-economic conditioning which includes poverty, social inequality, and illiteracy.
Despite the Government of India’s flagship campaign calling for ‘Beti Bachao’, sincere efforts to the effect of the slogan are still missing. Especially, amid the Corona-crisis grass-root problems emanating due to the prolonged lockdown seek enough attention, if not more.
After all, every child, irrespective of gender, is like a flower, filled with potentials of miracles and glory, waiting to be nurtured with utmost care!