The proposal to shift Childline 1098, the national helpline for children, from the administrative control of the Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD) to Ministry of Home Affairs, has drawn flak from child rights activists in Tamil Nadu.
ChildLine 1098 is an initiative for rescuing and assisting children in distress. It is operated by the ChildLine India Foundation, which is a nodal agency of the Ministry of WCD. However, Union Minister Smriti Irani, on Monday, said that after this shift, police personnel, instead of social workers, would handle the calls made to 1098.
The Union Minister said that the move was intended to make the State as the interface and to preserve data sensitivity. Following a report on this in The Hindu, Dharmapuri MP S. Senthil Kumar, also raised objections about the move in the Parliament. He said that children would have inhibitions speaking to the police and wanted the helpline to remain with Ministry of WCD.
“If police handle the call, confidentiality will be at stake. Children and even adults are already wary of the police. They will not call and pass on the information,” said Girija Kumarbabu, child rights consultant.
Ms. Kumarbabu added that the caller would be frightened if his/her identity would be revealed by the police to the suspects involved in the case. “This move is not in the best interests of children,” she added. Most often the information about children in distress is made by the child himself/herself or their friends.
Though the officials from the WCD Ministry claim that the move aims at preserving data sensitivity, child rights experts feel that there will be no transparency in data. “It is ideal to know where we stand as a nation in terms of child safety. For this data transparency is needed. If police are involved, the accurate data may be fudged. We also need to know why such a decision was taken by the government,” said A. Devaneyan, a child rights activist from the organisation Thozhamai.
He said there is a need to have public/private partnership in handling calls too. “Police are trained to maintain law and order. The conditioning of a policeman and a social worker is different. Social work is a practice based profession and is a core part in curing societal illnesses. This cannot be learnt through crash courses. Just knowledge about law is not sufficient,” he added.
Reacting to the claim by officials from the Ministry of WCD that they would build an ecosystem such that after a complaint was registered, the call could be handled by NGOs, he said that handling the callers should be done sensitively. “Otherwise reporting will also drop. We are doubtful if policemen can handle it,” he explained.
