FORGOTTEN CHILDREN

From losing parents to Covid-19 to being abandoned and abused, children have been silently suffering this pandemic. While the government has woken up to the issue, there is a huge need for children-specific Covid-19 management policy

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

Inside the long, narrow and serpentine lanes of a slum in New Delhi, 13-year-old Raveena Jankipura contemplates suicide. She feels “trapped, suffocated and abused” in her two-room house. Three months ago, her father lost his job in the lockdown that followed the second wave and has been home ever since. He has been sexually and physically abusing her; he recently burnt all her textbooks. Her mother is battling Covid-19 in a government hospital. With schools shut, Raveena is working as a daily wage labourer in a nearby factory. She looks forward to the backbreaking shift at the factory because it gives her an excuse to stay away from her perpetrator—her own father.

On April 20, in Jhalamand village of Rajasthan's Jodhpur, Akhil Mandopa, 12, was forcefully married off to a girl three years younger to him. To escape the prying eyes of the administration and activists, the 20-minute ceremony was conducted at 2am in fields far away from home. A marriage certificate was ready by morning, much to the chagrin of authorities. Around the same time in Jodhpur, Radha, 14, who had been married off as a toddler a decade ago, was forced by her in-laws to move to their house during lockdown. When she refused and questioned the legality of the marriage itself, they assaulted her and her family. She was later hospitalised.