Satyarthi launching new campaign for abused and trafficked children
NEW DELHI: Bruised and battered from previous campaigns against child labour, Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi hopes one million people will join his latest drive starting on Monday — against the sexual abuse and trafficking of children.
“It is a war on rapes, war on child sexual abuse and trafficking because these are not ordinary crimes and they cannot be solved through the business-as-usual approach,” Satyarthi said in an interview.
“Two children are sexually abused every hour. One child goes missing every eight minutes in India and they are not disappearing in thin air,” said Satyarthi.
“These children are trafficked... sold and bought like animals. Sometimes at lesser prices than animals.”
More than 9,000 children were trafficked in India in 2016, up nearly 25 from the previous year, according to the Ministry of Women and Child Development.
About 14,000 children were victims of rape and sexual harassment in 2015, data from the National Crime Records Bureau showed.
But those figures may only be the tip of the iceberg, with experts saying the government underestimates the numbers in a country where a shroud of silence surrounds such crimes.
Satyarthi hopes his “India March”, which will kick off from the country’s southernmost tip of Kanyakumari and finish in New Delhi on October 16 after travelling across all 29 states and seven union territories, will open people’s eyes to the mounting epidemic.
“We want to awaken the whole nation, we want to raise the consciousness against child sexual abuse and trafficking because it is a hidden menace,” he said.
Traffickers lure children, mostly from remote villages, with false promises of jobs before selling them off to brothels, factories or gangs which force them into begging.
The soft-spoken 63-year-old has been at the forefront of the drive against child labour in India, where over 10 million children are engaged in work, according to Unicef.
He blames India’s “failed” law enforcement, weak prosecution and low conviction rates for their plight, and founded Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Movement to Save Childhood) to rescue children working in horrifying conditions.
His teams often stage dangerous dawn raids on mills, dank mines and factories — many manned by armed guards — which employ children.
Satyarthi said his social conscience was awoken when he was about five years old and saw a boy his age outside a school, cleaning shoes.