The country’s various human rights lawyers and activists are celebrating early this year. The landmark ruling by the Supreme Court that states and sexual relations with a minor will constitute as rape was the best Diwali gift from the Judiciary.
Experts weigh in on the decision by the court as they feel that the land mark ruling is just the first step towards curbing the Child marriages. They feel that the society must do more than just adhering to rules.
India must target the “customers” of the sex trade and choke demand if the country is serious about ending the commercial sexual exploitation of children, experts said.
Thousands of children largely from poor rural families are lured or abducted by traffickers every year in India, and sold onto pimps and brothels who force them into sexual slavery.
“At the center of commercial sex exploitation lies the customer,” said P.M. Nair, chair professor and research coordinator on human trafficking at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, launching a new report to combat the crime.
“We can focus on the traffickers, the transporters, the pimps and the brothel owners, but the fact remains that at the center of it all is the customer. Yet prosecutions of customers are rare, if at all, in most states in India.”
Why are children targeted at all?
India has one of largest populations of children in the world, with more than 40 percent of its 1.2 billion people below the age of 18, according to its 2011 Census.
India is home to over 30 percent of the world’s 385 million most impoverished children, says the World Bank.Almost 20,000 women and children were victims of human trafficking in India in 2016, a rise of nearly 25 percent from the previous year, according to government data.
They loiter at traffic lights in cities, weaving between cars and knocking on windows to beg, or in makeshift roadside eateries washing dishes, or fields of cotton, rice and maize, toiling in the heat and exposed to toxic pesticides.
In wealthy middle class homes, they clean and care for children sometimes older than themselves, and in brothels they wait with painted faces to be raped by stranger after stranger.
While some children manage to escape or are rescued in police raids after tip-offs from activists or local residents, others are not so fortunate, trapped for years.
The demand to focus on the men who buy sex is one of a series of measures in the report by the National Coalition to Protect Our Children (NCPOC), an initiative started by Indian parliamentarian Rajeev Chandrasekhar.
“The abject poverty that most parts of our country still face is an enabling environment for child trafficking and to further compound this there is a lack of institutional organization to protect our children,” said Chandrasekhar.
“There are laws to prosecute the customers, but they are not being enforced.”
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