Tackling abuse through information

 

Last year, we, the media, tried to follow a criminal case to its trial. It involved children of poor parents who had been taken to a “children’s home” in Jaipur under the pretext of free education—instead, they found themselves abused in sinister ways. The children, and their abuse, were traced through the initiative of some women’s organisations— the children, including minors, hailed from poor villages of both Nagaland and Manipur.

Exploring the case further could have led us to investigate the varied roadblocks that the poor have to face in living a life of dignity. It would have involved understanding the importance of education, the lack of understanding among the poor of means to secure education, the right to education, the links between education and religion, the role of religion in human trafficking, how different states of India deal with extradition, how the civil society functions to keep track of citizens and their rights, the role of Non Government Organisations in securing the lives of children, etc.

But to be able to highlight these issues, the media also had the primary responsibility to be ethical—to protect the identity of the children and their families. While some newspapers, including in the national media, cared little for such ethical components, the case came to an abrupt end for the public as the media enthusiasm around the case dwindled.  

Also, “covering the issue too much and naming the places the children are being rehabilitated is causing a problem for the parents of these children in their respective villages,” said one social worker, while we tried to probe if the children were being adequately rehabilitated and schooled—has the case gone forward in court? According to the social worker, every time the issue was covered, though the parents of the children were illiterate, other people from the village who might have read or heard about the coverage from neighbours, discussed the case, which made the parents uncomfortable. It was humiliating for the parents, and brought to the fore their own inadequacies in sending their children so far away with their (parent's) consent, inadvertently to be abused.

While social humiliation might be a part of unearthing abuse, it is also essential to overcome this by keeping the discussion on abuse, and subsequent justice, alive so that more parents from poor backgrounds understand that there is a State responsibility here towards them and their children. The more people keep their heads down and forgo their rights as citizens, the more such abuse will recur with a lethargic State unwilling to stand by rights of its citizens. The media, in this case, merely plays the role of relaying information to the people so the State may be kept on its toes at all times. This calls for a certain level of cooperation from the people and allied institutions with the media so that issues of justice and discussions around them can be kept on the burner.