Hyderabad: “Assault is something, no one forgets and sexual assault is something that has lifelong mark on the victim”,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, lawyer, founder of Just Rights for Children (JRC), at the JRC Andhra Pradesh and Telangana partners meet in Hyderabad on Thursday.
Later in an exclusive interaction with Deccan Chronicle, Ribhu, the son of Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi, laid out the human cost behind the numbers that now dominate child protection debates.
Every hour in India, 10 children go missing, eight are trafficked and three are forced into labour every day. Data compiled by JRC shows that seven children face sexual crimes every hour, with 4 cases of rape reported in that time.
In 2022 alone, 1,861 children were officially registered as victims of online sexual abuse. The same year, global cyber tipline data recorded 5.6 million instances of child sexual abuse material uploaded from India which places the country among the largest sources worldwide, he said. Telangana has seen reporting, rescues and prosecutions rise, a trend Ribhu linked to stronger coordination between police, courts and civil society groups working on the ground.
“India has reached a point where child-marriage can be pushed below six per cent by 2030,” said Ribhu. The current national prevalence stood at around 23.3 per cent. He argued that waiting for gradual social change would cost generations of girls their childhood.
JRC data show that 4.7 lakh child marriages have been stopped across the country through local interventions, with panchayats, child marriage prohibition officers and community members reporting cases before ceremonies take place.
About 6.89 lakh children have been enrolled back in school through these efforts, and 70,000 girls have been linked to scholarship schemes. “The need to hold the perpetrators accountable, that is what is important,” he added.
Compared globally, the US state department’s ‘Trafficking in Persons’ report recorded 18,774 prosecutions of human traffickers across 170 countries in 2023. During the same period, 16,084 prosecutions were initiated in India by JRC partners alone.
Ribhu said rising prosecution numbers should not be mistaken for rising crime. He said higher reporting often followed trust in the system, as seen earlier when missing children cases became mandatorily registrable.
“India has done more work on child protection through the rule of law than any other country. We as a country should take the lead in advocating an international convention for a global sex offenders registry. There must be international sharing of intelligence and tracking of money trails linked to trafficking and online abuse.”
On online abuse, Ribhu said it was borderless and demanded cooperation beyond national boundaries. He warned that artificial intelligence had lowered the barriers for producing child sexual abuse material.
“Misuse of AI has grown into a global criminal industry and technology without accountability places children at grave risk. Technology is changing every three months, and crime is changing its form every three months. Our policies cannot take five years to respond,” he said, adding, “There is no bigger injustice than injustice committed under the pretext that a law does not yet exist.”
He said Telangana is well placed to lead efforts that link digital policing, survivor care and court processes.
“Shame must move from the victim to the perpetrator,” he said, adding that prosecution changes behaviour at the local level when offenders realise that impunity no longer exists and that is the only solution.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
