The state as parent

Child rape cases highlight the need for safe day care as well as outreach in migrant hubs

The rape of a six-year-old girl in Aligarh this week, followed by that of a five-year old in Delhi, points to the lack of security of children in poor neighbourhoods in migrant hubs. It underlines the cause of two parties - the child on the one hand, and the criminal on the other, especially when the perpetrator belongs to the same section of society.

What is most important for parents? Their child's safety. Followed by his or her being free from hunger and disease. If the state were to see itself as a parent, a child's safety would be its primary concern, too.

The state has responded with a handful of programmes that don't address the primary concern of a child's safety. These have to do with food and schooling.

This is despite the fact that the state does not have to necessarily worry about children of those families that have the means to ensure their child's safety.

The census data on slums in India recently released found about 17 per cent urban households in the category. It looked at urban facilities like water, toilets, cell phones, housing and so on. It did not look at social defence. It did not look at whether there were child care centres with a small playground for every 500 families of population. Because that is not a priority. And there are no schemes that ensure a poor mother has a place where she can leave her child to be looked after.

In the same 17 per cent of urban households, what can keep men from turning into criminals?

Harsh penalties, as advocated by the Bharatiya Janata Party, as a kind of shock treatment is understandable for people who have been deviant, despite the benefits of good education and upbringing. Criminals, who surface in these cases, are mostly products of neglected childhood, and with little education of any kind.

They are the ones who grow by chance, and are not brought up, as former top cop and activist Kiran Bedi puts it.

Not that deviant tendencies are the exclusive domain of these sections of people. The well-off among deviants carry on their acts of horror with no one getting to know of them. The Nithari incident is just one example.

The call for harsher laws and punishments - even death penalties - is justified for the privileged class of criminals, not for the migrant labourer whose whole existence has been the most harsh penalty conceivable.

What is required, as Bedi rightly says, is outreach to these sections by a combined effort of a humane version of police and community groups. She suggests the National Cadet Corps and other civil defence corps forming networks across these poorer neighbourhoods to provide value-based interaction, linkages with government and non-government facilities - even channelling their energies into creative fields. There can be sports clubs and competitions, theatre, music, and even sensitisation about laws.

Unless the state provides anything to citizens, it cannot demand anything from him, and expect any good out of random hangings of rapists.