ABUSE OF CHILDREN -- GENERAL

Some 50 per cent of India's children have been abused according to a year-long survey conducted by the child and welfare department, the Union department of women and child development (DWCD), the Delhi-based non-governmental organization (NGO) Prayas and funded by UNICEF published in March 2007.

India's largest survey on child abuse had 16,800 child (below 18) and 5,000 young adult respondents and covered 13 states, including Delhi, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Kerala, Bihar, Goa, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.

Main findings, four categories of abuse:

* 50 per cent Children who suffered abuse of one kind or other.
* 60 per cent Economically abused.
* 50 per cent Emotionally abused.
* 40 per cent Physically abused.
* 30 per cent Sexually abused by relatives or known persons.
* 25 per cent Sexually abused.

The survey defined four categories of abuse: emotional, sexual, physical and economic:

Emotional abuse, for example, a girl is constantly ill-treated for not being born a male, or any child pulled up for low performance at school.

Sexual abuse, for example, extends from fondling to rape.

Physical abuse, for example, is force used against a child by teachers, parents and others.

Economic abuse, for example, encompasses forced labour in both hazardous and non-hazardous places of work.

SILENT SUFFERING, SILENT SOCIETY?

New Delhi-based Outlook magazine said in its 26 February issue that "hidden from the media glare, millions of children [in India] suffer abuse in silence". The survey indicates that the extent of abuse of children saturates throughout many different aspects of Indian society, not just amongst orphanages, juvenile homes and street children.

Arun Pandey of the Goa-based NGO Anyway Rahit Zindagi says that child abuse has always been pervasive. He said: "The only reason why people are talking about it now is because society is beginning to see children as victims and is making an attempt to reach out to them." At least five per cent of the respondents said that they had resorted to substance abuse to cope with the sexual and/or physical trauma they were routinely subjected to.

Delhi: 25 per cent of children surveyed said that they had been abused sexually. Some 71 per cent said that they have been beaten, of which, more than 56 per cent said their beatings resulted in bleeding and 29 per cent needed medical attention. Nearly 80 per cent said they had been subjected to emotional abuse in Delhi.

AN IMPENDING ISSUE

The Outlook article says that the allocation for children in the national budget is very low, the Union budget for 2005-06 has been below 5 per cent of the total, of which, 0.034 per cent is allocated to child protection, some 3.76 rupees (less than 0.08 US dollars) per child.

Activist-advocate Ashok Aggarwal said that if current measures are not enough, instead it should be made mandatory to put every child rescued from forced labour or brothels into government-aided schools with hostels so that they can be integrated with the society. He was quoted in the Outlook article to have said: "I think it is high time the government began to really protect children instead of spending money on remand homes from where they usually escape to return to the very world from which they were rescued."

[No margin of error was given for this survey. Research: February 2007]

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You will also find many related articles at GLOBAL GIVING

Throughout the world an unknown number of children, most likely in the millions, are kept in orphanages and other non-penal institutions. Many of these children are kept in grossly substandard facilities and provided with inhumane care; some are left to die. Ironically, those responsible for nurturing and providing for the children they take into their care often physically and sexually abuse the children, and subject them to other cruel and degrading treatment. Even in institutions that are clean and provide adequate food, staff often neglect children, leaving them to lie alone in cribs or small beds with no stimulation, play, or adult attention.

Human Rights Watch has looked into the treatment of children in orphanages in four countries:

In the Shadow of Death: HIV/AIDS and Children's Rights in Kenya.

Romania's Orphans: A Legacy of Repression

Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's Orphanages

Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanages

KENYA

Human immuno-deficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a national disaster for the people of Kenya, children and adults alike. Kenya is estimated to have the ninth-highest prevalence of HIV in the world with about 14 percent of the adult population infected. An estimated 1 million orphans in the country represent only a fraction of the population of children affected by AIDS, which includes children withdrawn from school to care for a sick relative, those in families caring for orphans, and those who have had to become breadwinners to replace the income of a sick parent.

ROMANIA

In Ceaucescu's Romania, we found in 1990 that doctors forbidden to acquire medical information from outside the country had carried out a practice of giving small blood transfusions to children to "strengthen" them. Sadly, large numbers of children have contracted HIV as a result. In addition, children suffered from inadequate food, housing, clothing, medical care, lack of stimulation or education, and neglect. Disabled children suffered even grimmer conditions and treatment, with many malnourished and diseased.

CHINA

In China, Human Rights Watch documented in 1996 a secret world of starvation, disease, and unnatural death—a world into which thousands of Chinese orphans and abandoned children disappear each year.

A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State Orphanages, revealed a pattern of cruelty, abuse, and malign neglect that results in staggering mortality rates in state institutions. The Chinese government's own statistics revealed that in 1989 a staggering number of abandoned children admitted to China's orphanages were dying in institutional care. Many institutions appear to be operating as little more than assembly lines for the elimination of unwanted orphans, with an annual turnover of admissions and deaths far exceeding the number of beds available.

RUSSIA

In Russia, children were abandoned to the state at a rate of more than 100,000 per year. In a 1998 report, Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanages, Human Rights Watch documented the brutal treatment of these children, thousands of whom are exposed to appalling levels of cruelty and neglect. They were beaten, locked in freezing rooms for days at a time, and often subjected to degrading treatment by staff. From the moment the state assumes their care, "orphans" in Russia, 95 percent of whom have at least one living parent, are shockingly mistreated. Infants classified as disabled are segregated in "lying-down" rooms, where they are changed and fed, but bereft of stimulation and essential medical care.

Those who are officially diagnosed as "imbeciles" or "idiots" at age four are condemned to life in little more than a warehouse, where they may be restrained in cloth sacks, tethered by a limb to furniture, denied stimulation, training, and education. Some lie half-naked in their own filth, and are neglected, sometimes to the point of death. The "normal" children, those deemed to be "educable", are subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by institution staff. These children suffer a lifelong stigma that robs them of fundamental economic, social, civil and political rights guaranteed by international treaties.

We hope, through our work on orphanages and other non-penal institutions, to raise international awareness about the plight of children doomed to death or to life stunted by inhumane and degrading conditions, and to make significant changes in the way orphaned and abandoned children are treated throughout the world.

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