Muzaffarpur to Deoria

This amounts to both a negligence of duty, and also an entrenched indifference to the plight of these women and children, scrabbling for a life of dignity.

The similarity in the patterns of sexual abuse in shelter homes in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur and UP’s Deoria points at not just the systemic failure of the state to protect its most fragile, but also the many institutional loopholes that make possible the occurrence of such incidents at regular intervals. In both instances, repeated warning signals were ignored — while the Muzaffarpur social welfare department had given an adverse report on the NGO running the shelter home in 2013, in Deoria, the NGO continued to flourish despite its licence being suspended and funds discontinued since last year. What this amounts to is both a negligence of duty, and also an entrenched indifference to the plight of these women and children, scrabbling for a life of dignity.

The Union Minister for Woman and Child Development has now ordered the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights to conduct a social audit of all 9,000 childcare homes in the country — half of which were found to be unregistered during a 2017 study by the Ministry — to be completed within the next two months. A new proforma has been designed which will include a suitability check on those running these shelter homes besides the usual checklist on the facilities for and conditions of the inmates. These are in line with the sweeping procedural reforms mandated by the Supreme Court last year, in response to a PIL in 2007, following a similar incident of sexual abuse at a shelter home in Tamil Nadu.

The success of the audit will depend largely on the meticulousness of the various state agencies mandated to carry out these checks. But, for effective change to take root, it will also necessitate a sustained change in the attitudes of those involved in the supervision and running of these homes. Pity, or even evangelism, can be notoriously lopsided in dispensation of justice. They look at the world through a lens that divides it into an unequal relationship of benefactor and beneficiary. What these women and children — orphaned, abused, abandoned and exploited — need is not charity, but the solidity of empathy and a respect that can come only with the awareness that the state owes them their right to justice and a life of dignity.