They have been picked up from railway stations, schools, bus terminuses & playgrounds — no place is safe for our children, especially those in the 0-5-year age group. They become victims of human trafficking or prostitution. But there are times when they are found raped, killed and dismembered. The missing children’s issue is a serious one needing urgent redress. In this concluding part of our series on brutal child rapes, Deebashree Mohanty and Manjari Singh tell you that in the absence of a proper law and apathy of cops, most missing children will never return home
The missing children statistics are staggering. The issue continues to haunt the Indian political system. For many States and politicians, it is not even priority. If we don’t recover these children fast, most will end up like Gudiya — tortured, beaten and left to die
— Actor Anupam Kher at an event on 100 years of cinema
With every phone call, Mrs Vishnu Tripathy from Sarita Vihar would get excited. Otherwise confined to bed due to paralysis, she would come to life if the phone rang — ‘Did she callIJ Have the police found herIJ’, she would ask her 35-year-old engineer son Arjun. This would happen over and over again for years.
“My daughter Nidhi was just four when she went to school and never came back. This happened in 2010. Nidhi was going to a playschool in the locality. On August 16, just a week before her birthday, Nidhi went missing. Her school bus stopped at the stand but to my wife’s horror, my daughter was not in it. Her school didi had no idea where she had gone. We rushed to school, but she was not there either. Since this was only a start-up school, there was no provision of a CCTV. So we couldn’t tab Nidhi’s whereabouts.
“We had no clue whether she had been picked up from outside the school or something untoward had happened to her in school itself,” Arjun tells you. The hapless family has lodged many complaints against the school’s negligence. “We have been begging the police to find my only child,” Arjun says, unable to stop his eyes from welling up.
In the past two years, the Tripathys have done everything possible to trace Nidhi — hired a detective agency from lajpat Nagar IV to look into the matter at a whopping cost of Rs2 lakh, bribed cops, visited the police station a staggering 274 times and tried to find her themselves. But, Nidhi is nowhere to be found. Now her traumatised father tells you that he is hoping she is dead — not fallen prey to some sadistic pervert or the begging mafia. “My wife left me shortly after Nidhi disappeared. She requires constant medical intervention and has been given 16 shock therapies till now just to keep her mind in control. She doesn’t remember any of us and the doctor has advised us to leave her alone. My father passed away on January 12, 2011, after a cardiac arrest. My entire life has fallen apart. I have contemplated suicide many times. I cannot rest till I find what happened to my daughter,” Arjun, who works as a senior consultant with an MNC, says. Workwise too Arjun has suffered many setbacks.
In the wake of recent happenings in the Capital, many parents of missing children have resurfaced with their demand that the police find their wards who they fear might or must already have suffered Gudiya’s fate.
“The rape incident of five-year-old Gudiya has thrown up a challenge for the police. We are investigating the missing children cases registered with us. We fear that more than 66 per cent such children may never be found,” Satish Dhar, senior inspector, Ashok Vihar police station, says.
He tells you that missing children cases are the toughest to crack. “In most cases, children run away with a relative in search of a better life. While some return to their parents after a few months of self-exile, others never make it,” Dhar says.
It might stagger you to know that eight children go missing in India every minute, more than 90 per cent of them never to be recovered. The apathetic police approach and a skewed law that allows States to manipulate the definition of missing children to suit their personal agenda makes this a grim situation.
Agrees Vijay Vaidya, a social activist from Mumbai. His NGO Bepatta Vyakti Shodh Samiti, has been working on rescuing missing children for 25 years. “The number of children below five who go missing is steadily increasing. It is depressing when you cannot find a missing child. Part of the problem is that the law on missing children in India is inadequate. In the absence of a legal definition of a ‘missing child’, each State follows its own rules. Also, lack of co-ordination between States makes it difficult to track down such children. law enforcing authorities treat these cases in the most shoddy manner. They are usually accorded low priority by the police, who are required to focus more on maintaining law-and-order and checking other crime. In most States, the police do not even register an FIR, preferring to merely putting the name on their list of missing people. Without an FIR, an in-depth investigation is never done,” Vaidya says.
Dhar, however, assets that the low priority given to such cases is due to an altogether different reason. “Supposing, we get 100 cases of missing children, we find that more than 20 per cent have run away. In other cases, one of the parent is partner in the crime. In 5 per cent cases, these children are recovered from a relative’s place where the child had gone out of his/her accord. Such things make these cases low priority,” Dhar states.
He is currently in the pursuit of Meenakshi (12) who used to live with her parents in Pushplok, a ghetto near Ashok Vihar. According to her parents, Meenakshi was last seen on January 1, 2013 when she had gone to a local sweetmeat shop to buy some mithai. “Her parents filed an FIR on the January 2. As per the law, we waited for another 24 hours before pressing our PCR vans into service. Investigations revealed that shopowner Ram Dayal had also disappeared the same day. His shop was locked up and employees sacked.
“We found out the whereabouts of Dayal in a couple of days and were sure that we would recover Meenakshi from him. When we arrived at his house in Patna, his family was mourning his death. Dayal had committed suicide by throwing himself before a running train. His family had no idea why he had done so. local residents found his body on the rail tracks.
“We had hit a deadend on Meenakshi. But Dayal’s wife called us a week later to tell us about a letter he had posted to his family. In that letter, he said he had committed suicide because of a mistake he had committed,” Dhar recalls.
Nothing more to explain was there. “It remains a mystery what happened to Meenakshi — was she raped, killed, dumped by Dayal or was there some other angle to her disappearance,” Dayal says. The case goes on, with no leads.
Most missing children belong to slum areas and hail from Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.
Not always are these children forced into human trafficking or prostitution. Sometimes there are cases of brutal rapes and murders of missing children. After the infamous Nithari incident where body parts of at least 31 children were discovered from the drain of a house in NOIDA, parents fear the worst about their missing child.
“More than 86 per cent missing children cases are reported from slums. These children are easy target because there is almost no parental surveillance. They tend to wander away and, in most cases, go unnoticed. Parents fear going to the police station to even record a complaint,” Viji Arora, director policy and advocacy, CRY, tells you.
Sunita’s 10-year-old son Sonu went missing in 2010 and, she recalls how lodging an FIR was the most horrible experience for her. A house maid hailing from Balia and living in Jehangirpuri, Sunita went to the local police station to register an FIR. “After several visits, they registered the FIR but asked me to reimburse their fuel charges. I was shell-shocked. They said since they would have to burn fuel in finding my son, I would have to bear the expense,” Sunita recalls. She could not pay this money and has not heard from the police in the past three years and her son is still missing.
In some cases, police apathy has proved fatal. Families have lost a child because, they feel, the police did not act on time. Banwari lal’s 10-year-old son Gaurav was brutally killed by their relative in Meerut. For 15 days, the cops kept telling the hapless parents that he would come back. Only after a lot of pressure, did they agree to start a hunt.
“We live in a jhuggi and it takes a lot of guts for us to approach the cops for help. But I did so when my son did not return from the playground. At first, no case, not even a daily diary entry was made by the station incharge. And when they did so, it was too late. Gaurav was no more,” his father tells you. He was asked to “pay up” if he wanted the culprit arrested! No arrest has been made in this case.
lal tells you that skewed laws on kidnapping and missing children make it a lost cause for parents. They have to struggle against the entire system to get their child back, safe and sound — and mostly they lose the battle.
Turned away by the cops and nowhere else to go, families of missing children have gone on to the social media to post their missing person reports online. According to recent data released by alexa.com, a global monitor of online traffic, more than 10 such reports have been circulated in India every month. The mediums are diverse with Facebook leading the pack with over 1,600 missing people’s reports being circulated in just 2012.
One such case in point is that of Ashish Wadia, 28-year-old media professional with the news channel Aaj Tak. Wadia posted on Facebook, a report of his nephew who went missing on December 2, 2012. The response he got was overwhelming.
“Vivaan was only three when he was kidnapped and killed by a construction worker who was my sister’s spurned lover. He had threatened her of dire consequences if she did not leave her husband and child for him. In December 2012, he kidnapped Vivaan from the park and eyewitnesses confirmed that Raju was the man. The police nabbed him after 23 days. He had confined Vivaan to a small room in a flat he was constructing barely 10 km from his home.
“But the tip-off came too late. Vivaan was found nine days after he died due to hunger and thirst. His body had shrivelled up and decomposed. Raju would have gotten away with minor punishment had my FB friends not kept up the pressure with an intense online agitation,” Wadia says.
Targeting high-risk areas and stepping up surveillance in special zones could help curb such incidents. Children are at high risk at train and bus terminals. Those in the know say that touts hang around these places and kidnap unattended children. They are experts at grabbing them even if their parents are close by.
“Why do we assume that if a child is crying near a couple, he must be their son or daughterIJ What is the harm in enquiring whether all is well with the childIJ If vigilant citizens ask the right questions, many children can be saved,” Vaidya says.
There is also a more sophisticated manner in tracing missing children. Vinod Kumar Tikoo, member of National Commission of Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), feels it is high time that India designated an anti-trafficking unit to find missing children. “There’s no law as such but channels like an anti-trafficking unit can help trace these children. We need a concerted effort to make things work,” Tikoo says.
The problem of missing children remains a global issue. The US Department of Justice reports 7,97,500 children younger than 18 were reported missing in a one year period of time studied resulting in an average of 2,185 children being reported missing each day. 203,900 children were the victims of family abductions while 58,200 children were the victims of nonfamily abductions. 115 children were the victims of “stereotypical” kidnapping. These crimes involve someone the child does not know or a slight acquaintance who holds the child overnight, transports the child 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently.
“We can teach our children to be safe, to not talk to strangers, to be cautious, yet predators still exist. In America, the majority of child abductions come from within the sphere of people the child knows, such as a family member. The greater cause for concern is that there are cultures and regions in the world where the value of children’s lives are cheapened and disregarded. Programmes to raise people’s awareness about the dignity of children could have an impact, educationally. My paintings of missing children aim to do that — to promote dignity and to honour the fragility of childhood,” John Paul Thornton a reputed American artist and educator, tells you.
While the issue and law remain quite the same, it is a fact that the recovery rate of missing children in the West is far greater than in India. “Due to the lack of proper mechanisms we are not able to trace missing children in time,” agrees Vaidya.
But there are a few who have been lucky. Take the case of Irfan, a 12-year-old boy from Nangloi east in the Capital. He was one of the very few lucky children who returned safe. He had been kidnapped by a tout and taken to a remote Punjab village to work in the fields as a slave. He toiled there was over a year before being found.
Today, he has restricted himself to his kucca makaan as he is too scared to venture out alone. And, he wants to stay away from the media glare.
“I was playing near my house when two men came on a bike and started asking for directions. When I offered my help, they gagged me with a piece of cloth. I fell unconscious and the next thing I knew I was in Punjab at a sardar’s home. He made me work all through the day and would regularly beat me up. One day, I managed to break a window pane and run away to ludhiana. There, I started working with a property dealer. He was kind enough to give me food and shelter and also a salary. One day, he saw my photograph on the TV and asked me where I came from. I told him I was kidnapped from Delhi. He sent me back immediately. I couldn’t remember by address but I managed to reach Nangloi. A neighbour spotted me and took me home,” Irfan recalls.