RailEnquiry

Seventy per cent of children at Jaipur Railway Station did not have any access to police officials they could trust for protection. In fact, the Railway Police Force was implicated in numerous types of abuse and maltreatment of children including physical abuse, sexual abuse of girls and boys, incarcerating children on false accusations and exploitation for drugs and money.This was revealed in a study by Harvard School of Public Health in collaboration with the Public Health Foundation of India and FXB India Suraksha. The comprehensive study — developed on the SAFE Child Protection model developed by Theresa Betancourt, director of the Research Programme on Children and Global Adversity at Harvard University —was conducted on 49 children between the ages of 8-17 years, living and working on railway station.While trying to understand the safety conditions of these children, the study also revealed that the older children bullied, physically abused and sexually abused the younger children; girls who were orphans or without any caretakers were especially vulnerable.More than three-fourths of the children admitted to using drugs on a regular basis. Children as young as eight were severely addicted and spent most of their days high on whitener solutions. Two out of five children did not have access to health care services.Dr Aruna Bhattacharya of Indian Institute of Public Health said, “The thrust behind the study at Jaipur is to give every child a better future for their fullest physical, psychological, social, cognitive and cultural development.”