July 15, 2019:
The ministry of women & child development has asked the Tamil Nadu government to conduct inspection in all child care institutions in the state & find if they are resorting to corporal punishment or mistreating children to discipline them.
“We have informed all our district child protection units & child welfare committees in every district to conduct the inspection. We have been doing it regularly to check these issues,” said a senior official of the department of social welfare. The state has been asked to submit a detailed report by the end of July. The ministry has also written to other states to inspect their child care institutions.
However, despite official claims that regular monitoring has been in place to check & prevent homes from meting out harsh punishments as a form of disciplining, a recent study by the ministry revealed that children in at least 600 child care institutions in Tamil Nadu suffer beating, are starved & insulted.
The report titled ‘Mapping of child care institutions under the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015’ found that Tamil Nadu was among the top five states along with Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra & Karnataka that enforced ‘negative punishments’ as forms of discipline.
With 1,647 homes spread across 32 districts, Tamil Nadu has the highest number of child care institutions in the country. They house more than 87,000 children, who were either abandoned, orphaned, surrendered or sent to the homes because they had poor single parents.
The report found that children living in 650 of these institutions suffered harsh punishments regularly. As many as 87 homes resorted to regular beatings, 92 restricted their movements, 51 did not provide them food or basic supplies for days, 146 indulged in name calling & 40 used abusive language & insults to discipline them. All of these practices highlighted in the report are in violation of the Juvenile Justice (Care & Protection) of Children Act, 2015, which has a set of rules that homes must follow to deal with unacceptable behaviour of children. It mandates that the action taken must be appropriate with the degree of violation & the age of the child.
Indian Council for Child Welfare (Tamil Nadu) president Andal Damodaran highlighted the need to first train the ground-level staff of the institutions who are in contact with the children on alternative forms of punishments. “We need to find out if they are stressed or exhausted due to overcrowding in these homes. A sudden inspection is not going to change anything, we need to have long-term plans,” she said.
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