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Saturday 24 March 2007

Article: India set for tough child abuse law

NDTV March 19 2007full story at: http://www.ndtv.com/morenews/showmorestory.asp?category=National&id=102322

Excerpts:

India's National Commission for Children on Monday backed tough measures to protect children from abuse.

Its chairperson Shanta Sinha said children should become a part of national conscience to prevent abuse.

Her biggest tool could be the new Child Protection Bill. The draft of the Bill is awaiting approval by the Cabinet.

Forty-two per cent of India's population are children and crimes against them will soon become a non-bailable offence.

"There is just no data, if we don't know how many children are victims, how will we formulate policies?"

According to the draft of the Child Protection Bill: It will be compulsory for doctors, teachers and social workers to report cases of child abuse to the authorities.

Sources say while exploitation of women and crimes like rape have stringent laws there is little protection for boys from abuse – an area that the new bill will address.

Exploitation

The current laws also do not recognise exploitation of children either through sex tourism, child labour or violence against children including emotional abuse or instances like deliberate starvation.

Sinha says children between 0-6 age group are not on anyone's radar "Children of all ages are important till six years of age.

"Till now laws related to children have had minimal impact.

But recent incident involving murder and rape of children in Nithari near Delhi exposes the inability to protect them from abuse.

( Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/askios-activists/)

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