New Delhi, Aug. 9: Four in five among Delhi’s runaway children leave home for “love” and most of them are from the middle or upper middle classes, says the state child welfare committee.
“I blame (their addiction to) social networking sites and the kind of freedom their parents give them. They have easy access to money and undiluted freedom,” committee chairperson Sushma Vij told The Telegraph.
Even when the committee rescues them, often from slums where they live with their boyfriends, the girls refuse to relent and, after being sent home, often run away again.
Many of them eventually end up in the hands of traffickers — sometimes the boyfriend is himself a traffickers’ agent — and are sold off to brothels, Vij said.
“They are adamant about their love, when one can see that the boys are exploiting them. The girls think they are beauty queens and the boys think they are dudes who can do anything. They live in a world of fantasy where love conquers all. The girls often end up on the roads of Delhi,” Vij said.
She cited the example of a 16-year-old girl who was a brilliant student but ran away from her west Delhi home three months ago because her parents, both teachers in private schools, would not accept her relationship with a neighbourhood boy.
The girl was rescued a few days later by the committee from a shack in Gurgaon, living with her boyfriend who sold nude MMS clips of her for sustenance.
“She used to send him her nude pictures even before she ran away. We spent four hours trying to convince her that love can wait and she should concentrate on her studies. But she didn’t relent,” Vij said.
“We sent her home with a promise from her parents that they would get her married to the boy once she was old enough.”
But she ran away again within a month, this time with another boy, and insisted she was in love when the committee rescued her again in June, Vij said.
The girl, who had received awards for her high scores in her Class X exams, belonged to an upper middle class family and told committee counsellors she wanted to be a doctor.
The committee has released a report taking into account all the 4,291 runaway children it rescued in Delhi between January 2010 and June 2013. They were aged 10 to 17 years and were from various parts of the country. Most were girls.
The report says that Bihar accounted for 1,041 of these children, Uttar Pradesh for 856 and Delhi for 816. While about half the children from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar had left home and made it to Delhi for “better prospects”, 650 of the 816 Delhi kids had run away for “love”.
Vij said that even when village children left home for love, there was a difference in attitude between them and those from urban middle and upper middle classes.
“Their (village children’s) love seems more genuine — they flee because of caste and class issues.
“These children are relatively easier to counsel as all they require is their parents’ consent (to the relationship),” Vij said.
Social workers say that if the children from the states who flee to Delhi are not rescued within two to three hours of their arrival, their chances of being picked up by traffickers is very high.
“Traffickers lure these girls in the guise of being in love with them. The girls are sold off by the men they think they love,” said Pravin Nayar of Salaam Baalak Trust, an NGO that works with street children.
