NEW DELHI — A child disappears. Police are called. Nothing happens.
Child-rights activists say the rape last week of a 5-year-old girl is just the latest case in which Indian police failed to take urgent action on a report of a missing child. Three days after the attack, the girl was found alone in a locked room in the same New Delhi building where her family lives.
More than 90,000 children go missing in India each year; more than 34,000 are never found. Some parents say they lost crucial time because police wrongly dismissed their missing children as runaways, refused to file reports or treated the cases as nuisances.
The parents of the 5-year-old said that after their daughter disappeared, they repeatedly begged police to register a complaint and begin a search, but they were rejected.
Three days later, neighbors heard the sound of a child crying from a locked room in the tenement. They broke down the door and rushed the brutalized girl to the police station.
The parents said the police response was to offer the couple 2,000 rupees ($37) to keep quiet about what had happened.
“They just wanted us to go away. They didn’t want to register a case even after they saw how badly our daughter was injured,” said the girl’s father, who cannot be identified because Indian law requires a rape victim’s identity be kept secret.
Other poor parents of missing children say they also have found police reluctant to help them.
In 2010, police took 15 days to register a missing-persons case for 14-year-old Pankaj Singh. His mother is still waiting for him to come home.
“Every day my husband and my father would go wait at the police station, but they would shoo them away,” Pravesh Kumari Singh said as she sat on her son’s bed, surrounded by his pictures and books.
Formal police complaints were registered in only one-sixth of missing child cases in 2011, said Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer with Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or the Save the Childhood Movement. He said police resist registering cases because they want to keep crime figures low, and that parents are often too poor to bribe them to reconsider.
Activists say some children are trafficked and forced to beg on the streets. Some work on farms or factories as forced labor and others have their organs harvested and sold. The activists say young girls are pushed into the sex trade or sold for marriage.
“The government is just not ready to confront the issue of trafficking or missing children. And this gets reflected in the apathy of the police in dealing with cases of missing children,” said Ribhu.
In 2006, the Central Bureau of Investigation said at least 815 criminal gangs were kidnapping children for begging, prostitution or ransom.
