When we failed our children, we failed the world
Swaty Prakash is a mother, a writer, and an educator. She also fiercely adds that she is a former journalist who spent over a decade running after news for some of the country's leading newspapers and news agencies. However, she now freelances and dishes out free (and often unsolicited) advice to her child and her students. Teaching in an international school in Jaipur these days, she aspires to help those young writers bloom, and yes write her own story too. LESS ... MORE
The world is breaking apart. Not in some distant apocalypse or in the hands of a few power drunk global leaders, but here and now in the unmistakable unraveling of our ecosystems, communities, and most tragically, our moral compass. We speak of melting glaciers and violent storms, of poisoned rivers and extinct species, of fractured democracies and rising intolerance. Yet, amidst all these mounting crises, the most damning indictment of humanity may be this: we have failed our children. Not just in war-torn, faraway countries, but right here, in the neighbouring lane lined with dhabas and mechanic shops and in homes, where 14-year-olds are preparing our breakfast while we scroll through injustices in the world.
We have built a world where children pick rags before they pick up pencils, where they sleep under flyovers instead of roofs, where they are trafficked, violated, married off, silenced. The very idea that child rights need laws, protections, protocols, and conventions speaks volumes — that a child must fight for what should be guaranteed.
This collective failure is not due to a lack of legal architecture. We are surrounded by it.
A forest of laws — and a desert of accountability
India has, on paper, one of the most comprehensive legal frameworks for child protection. The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 reimagines children in conflict with law as needing care and protection. The POCSO Act criminalizes all forms of child sexual abuse, including aggravated assault by persons in positions of trust and power. The Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, especially after the 2016 amendment, bans all forms of child labour below 14 and hazardous labour for adolescents.
Each law is the outcome of deep pain and pressure. Each is supposed to mean that a child will not be married off at 13, raped by a teacher, made to clean sewers, or trafficked across borders. Each is a promise. But what happens when those promises aren't kept?
Internationally too, our commitments are robust. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 1989 — ratified by India in 1992 — guarantees protection from economic exploitation, protection from trafficking and sexual abuse, and the right to recovery and reintegration. The ILO Conventions No. 138 and 182 target child labour by specifying minimum ages for work and condemning the worst forms of child labour.
Yet, the very existence of these conventions points to the horrific truth: without them, there would be no brakes at all. No lines we're legally bound not to cross. And even with them, too many children remain invisible to the systems designed to protect them.
Our legal victories, hard won
It is public interest litigation that has often pushed these protections further. A landmark petition by Just Rights for Children (JRC) on the sexual exploitation of children in the online space has brought in some very basic changes in the child pornography or Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitative Material (CSEAM) cases. It makes even downloading or watching child porn in the closed walls of your house is a crime. But the fact that till the petition was filed, the paedophiles could do that clandestinely and without any legal scanner watching them is ironic.
In Bachpan Bachao Andolan v. Union of India, the Supreme Court laid down stringent guidelines against the use of child labour in circuses. In Independent Thought v. Union of India, it was clarified that marital rape of a minor is rape — even if she is married. Law has done heavy lifting. But it cannot heal what society continues to break.
But this isn't just about laws. It is about conscience. How did we build a world where we needed a Supreme Court judgment to say that a 15-year-old wife deserves the same protection as a 15-year-old unmarried girl? Why does the idea that children should be playing, not working, require activism and litigation?
What does it say about us — about our institutions, our governments, our communities — that we could be so organized about exploitation, and so lax about protection?
Every rescued child is not a symbol of success — but of the many who weren't saved in time. Real success lies not in rescue, but in prevention. In ensuring a child is never trafficked, never abused, never forced to grow up before her time. That begins with treating children not as passive beneficiaries of adult benevolence, but as rights-holders with agency, dignity, and the full attention of the law.
The world cannot afford to mistreat its children and hope to survive. If we do not change the way we value childhood — not just sentimentally, but structurally — then the world we hand over to the next generation will be even more unlivable than the one we inherited.
And that, perhaps, will be the cruelest failure of all.
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