Child Abduction

"The government is jut not ready to confront the issue of trafficking or missing children. And this gets reflected in the apathy of the police in dealing with cases of missing children."
Bhuwan Ribhu, lawyer, Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Children Movement), India

Kunwar Pal still looks for his son Ravi Kumar, 12, when he disappeared three years ago. Kunwar Pal has cycled across New Delhi, desperately searching for his son's whereabouts, for clues to his disappearance, to find reassurance that he is well. He visits police and railway stations, children's homes and hospitals. He hands out posters and photographs. The 45-year-old construction worker hopes his son was taken by a couple without children of their own; it is what he prefers to think.

"If they were to let me know somehow that my son is alive, I would be happy. They can keep him. Just let me see his shadow. Just let me know he's safe. If I were rich, my son would have been found by now. If I had money, the police would have taken the case more seriously", he said, wracked with weeping.

India's National Crime Records Bureau has reported 34,406 missing children that were never found in 2011 alone, an increase from the 2009 figure of 18,166. Those involved in trying to understand, attempting to track the problem feel the children are trafficked, forced to beg on the streets, to work on farms or factories as forced labourors. Even having their internal organs harvested and sold. And as for young girls, entered into the sex trade, or sold for marriage.

There is a shortage of marriagable girls in India, thanks to the culture of feticide that takes place so commonly among families preferring a male child over a female child. India has that in common with China, as a result of its one-child official policy and the cultural preference for male children. In both countries young males discover there is a paucity of women their age. Representing a social anomaly and a personal catastrophe.

Formal police complaints are registered in one-sixth of missing child cases. Police prefer not to register such cases, eager to maintain low crime figures. If bribes could be brought to bear police might react as they should, but most parents of missing and abducted children are too poverty-stricken to raise the funds to bribe officials in an overwhelmingly corrupt society.

The first few hours after an abduction, with the parents anxiously attempting to alert police, are the most critical. "The police can cordon off nearby areas, issue alerts at railway and bus stations, and step up vigilance to catch the kidnappers", explained Mr. Ribhu. Delays allow traffickers to move children far away where police have no jurisdiction. And there is no national database of missing children for reference.

In 2006 the Central Bureau of Investigation advised that there existed 815 criminal gangs whose specialty was kidnapping children to induct them into a begging enterprise, for prostitution purposes, or to claim ransom. "Despite our providing the police with all the details of where a child was picked up from, where he was taken, the police are simply not willing to act", said Mr. Ribhu.

When a five-year-old girl had vanished and her parents went in alarm to police, their pleas for action were ignored. Days later neighbours found the little girl in a locked room, dreadfully injured; she had been repeatedly raped, beaten and left for dead; her anguished cries had alerted neighbours to her presence in the very building in which her parents live.

The parents have said the police offered them $37 to say nothing. "They just wanted us to go away. They didn't want to register a case even after they saw how badly our daughter was injured", the father complained. "There have been shortfalls, so the station house officer and his deputy have been suspended", explained New Delhi's police commissioner.