India set for tough child abuse law

NDTV CorrespondentWatch story
Monday, March 19, 2007 (New Delhi):
India's National Commission for Children on Monday backed tough measures to protect children from abuse. Its chairperson Shanta Sinha said children should become a part of national conscience to prevent abuse.Her biggest tool could be the new Child Protection Bill. The draft of the Bill is awaiting approval by the Cabinet. "The first task is to know who the victims are," Sinha said in an exlusive interview to NDTV. Non-bailable offenceForty-two per cent of India's population are children and crimes against them will soon become a non-bailable offence. The legislation will provide authorities with a mechanism to identify and punish offenders for crimes against children.The Ministry for Women and Child Development feels existing laws are inadequate to recognise and penalise offenders. Sinha says trafficking and sexual exploitation of children should be on top of the nation's agenda. "There is just no data, if we don't know how many children are victims, how will we formulate policies?" "It's a monumental task but need to collate data of how many children are missing how many are trafficked," said Sinha, a winner of the Magsaysay Award. According to the draft of the Child Protection Bill: It will be compulsory for doctors, teachers and social workers to report cases of child abuse to the authorities. Sources say while exploitation of women and crimes like rape have stringent laws there is little protection for boys from abuse – an area that the new bill will address.ExploitationThe current laws also do not recognise exploitation of children either through sex tourism, child labour or violence against children including emotional abuse or instances like deliberate starvation.Sinha says children between 0-6 age group are not on anyone's radar "Children of all ages are important till six years of age."Till now laws related to children have had minimal impact. But recent incident involving murder and rape of children in Nithari near Delhi exposes the inability to protect them from abuse.