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Police lockups, beatings and torture... that's life for Indian street children

In a sharp indictment of the country's police force, the Human Rights Watch reports that Indian street children are routinely detained illegally, beaten, tortured and sometimes killed by the police.

Several factors contribute to this phenomenon. These include the police's perception of street children, widespread corruption and a culture of violence, says the report, titled Police abuse and killings of street children in India.

The inadequacy and non-implementation of legal safeguards and the level of impunity that law enforcement officials enjoy are other factors.

The report observes that police generally view street children as vagrants and criminals. While it is true that these children are sometimes involved in petty theft, drug trafficking, prostitution and other criminal activities, the police tend to assume that whenever a crime is committed on the street, they are either involved or know the culprit.

Their proximity to a crime is considered reason enough to detain them, and this abuse violates both Indian domestic law and international human rights standards, the report points out.

The report documents police abuse of Indian street children and deaths of children in police custody based on investigations conducted during 1995-96.

The international watchbody, set up in 1994 to monitor and promote the human rights of children around the world, spoke with over 100 street children as well as representatives of non-governmental organisations, social workers and human rights lawyers in Bangalore, Bombay, Delhi and Madras.

Street children were found to be easy targets as they were small, poor, ignorant of their rights, and often had no family members who would come to their defence. According to the report, police had financial incentives to resort to violence against children. Many of those interviewed said they were beaten on the street because the police wanted their money.

The prospect of being sent to a remand home, the police station or jail, coupled with the threat of brutal treatment, created a level of fear and intimidation that forced children, or in some cases their families, to pay the police or suffer the consequences.

Indian law was found to contribute to the problem. Under the Indian Penal Code, anyone over the age of 12 is considered an adult. Ambiguities in the code concerning the ability of the child to be cognisant of a crime makes it possible for children as young as seven to be treated as adults under the law.

It was also pointed out there were no provisions in the code that prohibit the detention of juveniles in police stations or jails. The Juvenile Justice Act, which applies to all the states and Union Territories except Jammu and Kashmir, does prohibit the detention of neglected or delinquent juveniles in police lockups or jails, but these provisions are routinely ignored by the police.

Moreover, at the remand stage, the law makes no distinction between neglected and delinquent children so that a six-year-old orphan on the street and a 15-year-old who has committed murder are likely to be treated the same way, the report points out.

Though the National Police Commission had in 1979 issued a devastating indictment of police behaviour with regard to custodial abuse including abuse of children, more than a decade-and-a-half later none of its recommendations have been adopted, and police continue to detain, torture and extort money from children without fear of punishment, the report regrets.

A long-term approach to curb police abuses against street children began in 1994 when UNICEF, the ministry of home and welfare and a Bangalore-based NGO working with street children initiated a police training curriculum. The curriculum was designed to sensitise the police to the special problems that street children face and educate police about the provisions and implementation of the Juvenile Justice Act.

But it was found that the NGO, which was implementing the pilot project of the police training curriculum in 1994-95, also recorded 154 interventions at police stations involving 198 children kept in lockups during this period.

The report makes several recommendations to the government of India to effectively tackle this alarming problem. They include implementing the recommendations made by the NPC, specifically those that call for a mandatory judicial inquiry in cases of alleged rape, death or grievous injury to people in custody, and the establishment of investigative bodies whose members would include civilians as well as the police and judicial authorities.

Other suggestions include implementing the Juvenile Justice Act in all states and Union Territories, amending the Act to provide for a complaints, creating a prosecution mechanism for cases of custodial abuse of children, and amending the Trade Union Act to allow in children to such bodies.

UNI

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