Resisting paranoia key to keeping schoolchildren safe

Following the horrific incident of the murder of a young boy in Ryan International, Gurugram, the various school-related WhatsApp groups I belong to as a parent, are buzzing with messages. A dominant strand of the narrative seems to be that drivers, guards, canteen boys and other workers are potential culprits, and fixing their behaviours/attitudes will solve a chunk of the threats that our children face. There are suggestions to conduct “sensitisation workshops” for this group of people to “sow and nurture seeds of compassion and good values” in them. These proposals are widely applauded and accepted as smart ideas.

It made me reflect on how there’s been a huge breakdown in trust between the middle and lower classes over a generation.

Parents of current schoolgoers — those of us now in their mid-30s and 40s — spent their own childhoods playing in the compound or local park, often with children of domestic workers or the workers themselves. Poorer people were closely intertwined with our daily life as kids. Those who grew up in government colonies, townships and cantonments in the 1970s and 80s will remember that drivers, cooks, maalis, liftmen, watchmen were roaming around freely amidst children, picking up little girls on their shoulders and taking kids on joyful rides on their own bicycles. If you rewind to one generation earlier, current grandmothers will narrate how when they were little girls, they would wander off with the farmhand or the man who tended the cows and that’s how they learned to milk cows or cut grass or make dung cakes or some fun dexterous trick. 

No one would watch over all this activity. Perhaps, there were instances of abuse which happened and were unreported but they were not necessarily perpetrated only by workers. By and large, most present-day parents have intermingled freely as kids with those who served in their homes. And yet, now when it comes to our own children, we tend to view all working-class men as predators. Incidents like the one in Ryan school where a bus conductor has been nailed as the culprit, have only strengthened this paranoia, unfortunately.

Is there any basis to assume that working-class men are the main perpetrators of crimes against children? 

The National Crime Records Bureau’s statistics for various years shows that incidents of rape of children below 16 years were 695 in 1975, 1,127 in 1985, 4,067 in 1995, 4,026 in 2005, and a dramatic increase to 10,854 cases in 2015! Clearly, crimes against children have increased, even accounting for better reporting. But there is not much clarity on who the criminals are and what their socio-economic background is. 

In 2015, 94,172 crimes against children were reported, up by 5.3 per cent from the previous year. These include kidnapping, abduction and sexual offenses with Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and West Bengal being the worst offenders. Under sexual offences, 95 per cent of the cases were perpetrated by people known to the child. Of these, 11 per cent  were by family members, 38 per cent by neighbours, 27 per cent by employers and co-workers, and 23 per cent by “other known persons”. One can assume that people like drivers and guards fall in this last category, although this could also include teachers, for example, who are not blue-collar workers. Going by the statistics, workers pose less of a threat than neighbours. 

School safety audits are not only about CCTV cameras trained on workers, but equally about open tanks, unmanned swimming pools, lose electric wires, safety during picnics and excursions, emotionally and physically abusive teachers, bullying classmates and children putting themselves at risk because of online dares like the Blue Whale Challenge. 

There are many cases of helpful and caring bhaiyas and didis in schools who make our children, especially the younger ones, feel comfortable. We have to be careful not to miss the wood for the trees in the paranoia generated by media hype and ignorance about real pitfalls.

The writer is the author of the book Urban Villager: Life in an Indian satellite town