Juvenile (In)Justice System
By Ajita Banerjie
14 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org
“It would have been better if we had murdered someone. We could have gotten out of the jail much earlier than rotting in this place”, one of the girls had once said. Perturbed, I ask her, “Why do you say so?”
I never received an answer for that. But I understood what she meant. In the next one month that I spent in the Rehabilitation home for Juvenile Girls I realized what our phenomenal system is doing to the youth of the country. Young, impressionable girls are being subjected to a life of confinement, boredom and frustration. “It is our fault, didi”, they tell me. We committed a mistake, that’s why we are being punished here. We did dirty work, so now we have to go through the punishment so that we learn a lesson.”
“It’s not your fault”, I tell her with a heavy heart. “You haven’t done anything wrong. Wrong has been done to you.” They don’t believe me. They have been told what to believe.
Most of these girls belong to economically weaker sections and are uneducated. Some of them enter prostitution and other professions like dance bars in order to earn money for their families. Some of them are trafficked by their own family members (parents included) for earning an income.
So the Juvenile Justice system has accomplished quite the opposite of what it had set out to do. Wasn’t the entire point of a separate Justice System for minors to protect them from the brutality of adult prisons? It is then extremely disconcerting that the Juveniles in rehabilitation homes feel that they are imprisoned and that they have committed an offence when they are the victims.
The girls at the Home are all between ages 14-17 and have been rescued from a situation described as “vulnerable” such as a brothel, dance bar or a family where they have been abused.
“It must feel very safe to be here then, right?” I ask them.
“We hate being here. All we talk about is when we would get out of this place.”
I spent a month with these girls at the Rehabilitation Home in the capacity of a student social worker. The girls had started sharing their woes with me on a daily basis. Initially the problems were about not getting basic utility products such as shampoo and soap. But very soon the issues gained gravity.
“There are rats in our room. They bite us every day. Look at our feet. All bitten by rats”, Shona said pointing to her feet. I confirmed with all the girls. All of them had been bitten by rats. Mosquitoes just took a back seat and seemed like much less of a monster now.
“The food is very bad. The ration kept in the kitchen has insects. Come and see for yourself”, I was told very confidently by Rashmi. I did go and investigate. The flour was kept in a sack, open and the kitchen was very unkempt and unhygienic. The girls are made to cook everyday even though there is a caretaker assigned as cook. The girls slave away in the kitchen while the caretakers enjoy the sun. They have even been mildly burnt on a few occasions and were threatened not to tell the officers.
On being asked why they never complain, they told me that they are scared that the caretakers might delay their case. It was enraging to know that the caretakers had been misusing their power and keeping the girls under constant fear.
The girls in the institution go through tumultuous emotions. Some of them have an anger issue while some of them have an inhibited personality and are very reserved. Some of the girls have developed behaviour patterns like compulsive lying and conjuring false stories about their past and feigning illness. Research has shown that such behaviour patterns appear in people who are confined under authority in prison like situations.
Many girls have psycological health issues that need to be resolved. Some of the girls are provided with counsellors who visit the agency only once a week. This makes the girls even more anxious as they pine to share their problems and give vent to their anger. This lack of space results in brutal fights to give vent to their frustrations.
For some of the girls, the home is like living on an island. They have no access to the world outside. The walls of the Home are also high up that the street remains out if sight. Some of the girls are sent for skill development training sessions conducted by an NGO. There is however some girls who have not been enrolled in these classes. Being left on their own all day, they get into fights, get depressed and constantly worry about getting out of the home. They feel trapped in the institution as they have nothing to look forward to. Is this selective rehabilitation justified on the part of the Child Welfare authorities? The girls sit idle all day and feel worthless. They think of committing suicide and talk about life being futile. One of the girls attempted to commit suicide by drinking a bottle of shampoo. She had expressed the will to study There is no other engagement for these girls on a daily basis. If there is no constructive activity to engage them in what is the idea of ‘rehabilitation’? At the end of a month, these girls were much more depressed, quiet and negative about life than they were when I first met them. Most of them had become very angry, rude and constantly abused each other. The caretakers would see them being rash with each other but wouldn’t discourage them till a physical fight would break out. It is almost as if they want to push them to pick a fight for their own amusement.
The home is a brutal place for new comers and the weak. There are these girls who bully the rest of the girls and wouldn’t let them speak to the new comers. This happened to Rani, a 16 year old girl from a village in Bengal. Rani has intellectual impairment and could possibly have ADHD as well. She was extremely violent in one moment and extremely timid in another. She was married off to a much older man at the young age of 13 and had already given birth to her first child when she was 14. Her husband, infuriated at the sight of a girl child, killed the baby in front of Rani. “That’s when I lost my mind, didi”, she recalls smiling and crying at the same time. The second time when she had a girl, her husband abused her and left the house. The trauma of her horrific past had affected her mental health. She was trafficked from Bengal to Mumbai and was rescued by the police at the station who then admitted her to the Home. Since that day till the day she was sent back to West Bengal, the girl was bullied, beaten up and harassed by all the other girls. She would cry all the time and tell me how they would throw water on her bed, abuse her, tease her and call her mad. She was called mad till the point that she started believing it and started calling herself mad. She was alienated and lost and was neglected even by the authorities. She was kept out of the dance and karate classes as she couldn’t coordinate her body movements. She was bullied and made to cry each day of her stay.
Cases like Rani’s make us question the very essence of Justice and Care and Protection. Institutions like these have only their symbolic value remaining with no radical action taken for providing an opportunity of a new life with newly acquired skills, confidence in self and awareness to protect one’s self. The home should have self-defence sessions like karate and train the girls to protect themselves. There should be regular classes for sports, dance and other physical activities that help them channelize all the negative energy into something constructive. The girls should be trained in a variety of skills that would help them get employed so that they don’t have to resort to sex work to earn a living.
Another point of contestation with the idea of rehabilitation lies in the choice of skills and activities for the girls. The training sessions are designed for a beautician’s course, tailoring and jewellery making. These activities propagate the idea of ‘gendered division of labour’ where women are involved in reproductive labour while men engage in productive labour. Activities such as knitting, tailoring, washing, cleaning, cooking has always been considered the women’s domain. Somehow this caveman dynamics with respect to labour and identity has not been divulged completely. If these polarities between gender roles are not questioned, then the subtext of the discourse is the acceptance of women as the inferior, weaker sex.
If poor infrastructure, bad facilities and a corrupted sense of morality is what we have to offer to our youth, then our judgements seem to be coloured. Justice should not become a matter of tokenism or a negotiation. Under the garb of ‘care and protection’ the system cannot bargain away with the rights of our children. If the ‘Home’ makes the children want to commit suicide, what are the welfare committees here for? The prerogative of the Juvenile Justice System should be to work on a rights based framework and provide Justice rather than huddling up the children together and confining them in a “safe” space. The dominant narrative of ‘protection’ needs to be rethought and changed to empowerment with an understanding of one’s rights that must not be compromised on, at any cost.
Ajita Banerjie (Student at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.)
For comments, views, queries contact at - [email protected]
This article was written based on observations made in the Rehabilitation Home for Juvenile Girls who are in cases under the ITPA during fieldwork. All names have been changed to maintain confidentiality.
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