How many times have you come across a scene like this? Photo: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury
.
What a way to begin the week after the long Easter
weekend. First, we got the news about baby Afreen in Bengaluru, whose
father has allegedly beaten her to death. He did this apparently because
he wanted a son and was mad at this wife for producing a girl. Then in a
village near Jalgaon, Maharashtra, a 19-year-old girl was strangled to
death. The chief suspects are her father, uncle and grandmother. The
reason: she was in love with a boy from another caste. And in Mumbai,
the police arrested a 20-year-old man who was trying to abduct two minor
girls.
But distressing as these reports are, the
news from Delhi the previous week of the 13-year-old domestic left
locked in a flat by her employers who went off to Bangkok is even more
chilling. The facts of that case are now well known and even the
international media has reported them. The couple, both medical doctors,
have been arrested and charged under various provisions of the Juvenile
Justice Act, the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, the Child Labour
(Prohibition & Regulation) Act and the Indian Penal Code. The girl,
rescued by the fire brigade when neighbours reported seeing her on the
balcony crying, has now been taken to a shelter. And the man who brought
her to Delhi from Jharkhand has also been arrested.
Subterranean cities
This
story, however, does not end here. It is the beginning of another
story, one that gives us a glimpse into a nether-world, one where
children are kidnapped, stolen or sold into servitude from some of the
poorest parts of India; a world where these children have no choice, no
voice. When we think of trafficking, we usually think of the sex trade.
In fact, many children are trafficked into domestic and other forms of
labour and are never detected.
The story of the
13-year-old girl in Delhi is not an exception. Every now and then
similar stories are reported in the media. In Mumbai, we still remember
the horrific tale of 10-year-old Sonu who was tortured by her employers
and eventually died from the injuries.
But there are
two aspects of this story that are particularly worrying: indifference
and impunity. Let us take the latter first. In October 2006, the
government included domestic work in the Child Labour Act. Earlier,
children under 14 years were prohibited from working in a number of
hazardous industries that were identified. After 2006, the law banned
children from being employed as domestics or to work in dhabas and
restaurants. Yet, many like the educated professional couple in this
case, think nothing of breaking this law.
Usually,
when people like them are asked why they employ children, they come out
with a set of standard excuses: “We were looking after the child as if
she was our own”. “We were feeding and clothing her, something she would
not get in her village”. “She is like a member of our family”, etc. But
the point is that they are breaking the law. And with impunity. The
fact that so many affluent and middle class people do this is because
they are confident that the law applies to others, not to people like
them. In fact, they firmly believe that most laws apply to others, not
to them.
Unacceptable numbers
Data
is not easily available on this issue but roughly 20 per cent of the
12.6 million child workers in India (these are official figures and
therefore a gross underestimation) are domestic workers. Of these, the
majority are boys. But girls too work as domestics and are particularly
vulnerable to sexual abuse. Both boys and girls suffer various levels of
physical abuse.
The other side of impunity is
indifference. How many of us turn our faces away when we see a woman
being harassed, a child being beaten, a law being flouted? No one wants
to be involved. I wonder how many people in the housing colony where
this couple lived were aware that a child was working in that house?
What stopped any of these people from reporting this to Childline, which
has a well-advertised number (1098) that anyone can call and an email
address where a complaint can be sent?
We are not
helping any children, including our own, if we justify employing
children to work in our homes. We are flouting not just the child labour
laws but also the constitutional provision that gives every child the
right to compulsory and free education. Sadly, in India, being educated
and part of the better-off class does not necessarily add up to
enlightened attitudes. As with dowry, the more we learn, the more we
earn, the more we slip back in our attitudes.
(To read the original, click here:All work, no play)
