Children cannot reform the system
vacancies quickly. It is worth wondering about why governments now need laws to feel motivated to fulfil a routine responsibility. Children’s civic awareness and activism can hardly compensate for the absence of a sense of responsibility among authorities.
Child abuse presents a similar case. Responding to frequent stories of small c dren being sexually abused while at school, many urban parents now train their children to recognise their vulnerability and to resist abuse. Children are taught to differentiate between ‘good’ touch and ‘bad’ touch. They are also told to report their everyday school experience when they come home. Thus, children as young as three or four are now expected to protect themselves because the school and higher authorities cannot protect them. The consequences of early awareness of sexual vulnerability are both complex and open to debate. What is not debatable is the failure of society and State to accept their responsibility towards children.
When small boys and girls are told to practice wakeful vigilance for their own safety and security, something precious is subtracted from their experience of childhood. As a society, we probably don’t recognise children’s need for childhood perhaps because we ourselves feel insecure leaving children in institutions that we don’t fully trust. The idea of a monster can’t be a fantasy if a child is required to expect one at school. Turning children into perpetually alert, self-defending activists can hardly resolve this institutional crisis. State functionaries who say that they cannot resolve it without social support are evading the truth.
Problems like chronic scarcity of teachers or stodgy recruitment and training procedures can’t be laid at the door of society. If the State is unable to ensure the human quality of the adults who have access to children at school, parents can’t compensate for this failure. Nor can their attempt to find a personal solution help improve the system. Though it may help to cope with a larger problem, child activism signifies policy failure. It also indicates India’s mutation from a welfare state into a laissez-faire raj where children must fend for themselves.