New Delhi: After instances of sexual abuse of minor girls has come to light in two different shelter homes – Muzaffarpur in Bihar and Deoria in Uttar Pradesh – Union minister for women and child development Maneka Gandhi has called for an audit of all 9,000 institutions across the country which house girls who have been orphaned, abandoned or rescued.
According to the Indian Express, Gandhi said on Tuesday (August 7), “I have asked the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) to ensure that the social audit is completed for all child care institutions within the next sixty days. I have designed the proforma for it.”
Audit reports will have to be submitted within the next two months, the newspaper reported. The minister also said that the proforma for this audit will go beyond the usual questions of number of beds, etc. and also include details like a complete background check of those running the homes as well as the condition of the children.
Two days ago, Gandhi had said that there could be many more cases of sexual abuse of minor girls at shelter homes that needed to be uncovered and urged states to have a single, large facility for children to prevent their “abuse and misuse” by NGOs.
Gandhi had then suggested that a single, large facility in states will make it easier for authorities to check “abuse and misuse” of children by NGOs, who run the shelter homes funded by state governments. She said adoption and skill development programmes at a single facility would be much easier.
“For the past two years, I have been writing to MPs, asking them to inspect shelter homes in their localities. We have even got audits done by NGOs at shelter homes and they didn’t report anything unusual which means they have not done it thoroughly,” she said.
Gandhi said her ministry “would be happy” to fund the construction of a single, central facility in each state and then hand over to the respective state governments.
The issue of sexual abuse of minor girls first made headlines in April after the Tata Institute of Social Sciences submitted its audit report of shelter homes in Bihar to the state social welfare department. It raised the possibility of sexual abuse of girls at a shelter home in Muzaffarpur, which was later confirmed by their medical examination.
The FIR in the first major sexual abuse case in Bihar was registered on May 31 against 11 people, including Brajesh Thakur, the owner of the NGO which ran the government-funded shelter home for destitute girls.
On July 26, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar recommended a Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry into the matter. He has said that the government was “ashamed” by the incident. Thirty-four of 42 minor girls at the shelter home were sexually abused.
The second case was reported from Deoria in Uttar Pradesh on Monday when a ten-year-old girl managed to flee from a shelter home and informed authorities about the plight of the inmates, who were reportedly sexually abused by the couple running the home.
Following that, the police raided the facility and rescued 24 girls. Eighteen girls are reportedly missing from the home. Like in Bihar, the Uttar Pradesh government has handed over the inquiry to the CBI.
According to the Indian Express, 19-page model social audit proforma submitted by the Centre to the Supreme Court in October 2015 during a hearing on sexual abuse at a Tamil Nadu orphanage contained five questions ‘Prevention and Protection from Abuse (including emotional, sexual and physical)’. While these questions centred around institutional mechanisms, they failed to take into account instances of sexual abuse experienced by the children.
(With PTI inputs)