Counsellors help child workers win justice

Thousands of children from Bihar trafficked to Jaipur as slave labour

When counsellor Arti Sharma met a 10-year-old boy, whose father sold him for Rs500 (Dh25) to work in a bangle factory, she expected tears — not a stony silence.

It took her more than a week to get the child, who had run away from the factory, to share his parents’ address so that she could send him home. But his traffickers were never punished because the boy’s case was not registered with the police. “He was in pain, angry and needed immediate help,” said Sharma, 27, sitting in her counselling room at the Taabar shelter in Jaipur city, a tourist hub in western India, which cares for child labourers and other vulnerable children.

“I knew how essential it was to connect with him and understand what had happened but I felt ill-equipped. The boy wouldn’t speak,” she said three years later, reflecting on the improvements in child protection that have since taken place.

Jaipur city administration vowed in January to make the city of fortresses and palaces free of child labour, in a campaign which includes creating a pool of counsellors to help the police and lawyers work with victims to boost conviction rates.

The challenge is immense. Born into poverty, thousands of children — mostly boys — from the northern Indian state of Bihar have for years been trafficked to Jaipur to work as slaves making bangles and sewing fabrics for its multibillion dollar handicraft industry.

Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan state, which has one of India’s highest numbers of child workers — 250,000 — in a country where some 4.4 million children aged five to 14 work, census data shows.

Not a single conviction

Although the state-run district legal services authority, which offers legal aid, estimates there are usually about 200 child labour cases ongoing in Jaipur courts, there had not been a single conviction in a decade at the start of 2019.

“Prosecution of traffickers is almost impossible unless the child and his family understand that child labour is a crime,” said Suresh Kumar, executive director of Biharbased child protection charity Centre DIRECT.

“The crime can be busted only through counselling of the child and his family, who often don’t know that their son was beaten, denied food and forced to work 12 hours. They don’t realise that some boys can barely stand when they are rescued.”

Children rescued by the police were taken to shelters but with limited psychological support, they usually refused to open up to staff, police or lawyers.

The government set up a Centre for Child Protection at the Rajasthan Police Academy in 2015 to research child rights and train the police, judiciary and counsellors to combat child trafficking.

Dozens of new counsellors are being trained to provide regular support to more than 450 boys whose cases are in court and ensure that the children return home safely afterwards. The police are being trained to file better complaints, while prosecutors are sharpening their skills in preparing children for the difficult process of cross-examination and giving convincing testimonies in the witness box.