The making of a thief: How child traffickers lure kids into stealing racket

Raju (name changed) has an unusual job, unusual at least for kids of his age. It involves a stint of training, apprenticeship, a regular income and incentives and disincentives. It’s a high risk job for someone barely 12 though. He steals mobiles, wallets and snatches purses from people in busy areas of Noida. His bosses have set a daily target for him. He has to steal a mobile phone or items worth a minimum Rs 500 daily. If he exceeds the target he gets a small reward. If he fails to meet it then he is beaten, attacked with knives and burnt with cigarettes. His friends, he knows, have been sodomised as punishment for lapses. If he is caught in the act he is often beaten up mercilessly in public. He is made to understand this is the risk that comes with his job. Theirs is no point complaining about it or it is no reason to bunk work even for a day. [caption id=“attachment_2105963” align=“alignleft” width=“385”] Representational image. AFP.[/caption] Raju is a small cog in the big, complex child trafficking racket that stretch from Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to Delhi and other metros. Each child earns around Rs 50,000-Rs 75,000 a year by committing smaller crimes. The money earned is given to traffickers in Delhi who control the children. A portion is often then sent back to the states where other traffickers use it to lure more children to move to Delhi. It’s racket that has been around for decades. Despite making media headlines periodically, nothing seems to have changed. But it’s a story that needs to be told again and again. The hope: with continued media attention it might see inter-state police action some day. Firstpost spoke to two such children who were caught by the police for stealing a valet and a mobile phone recently. Both are from Sahebganj in Jharkhand. “I was brought to Delhi by someone called Sunil, who belongs to my village. He brought me here on the pretext that he would take me around the city. After introducing me to a person, whom I did not know, he disappeared and never came to see me again. I was asked to arrange money by stealing purse, mobile phones and jewellery if I wanted to return. I had to do it because I was left with no option,” said one of the boys, around nine years of age. While stealing a mobile phone, he was caught by people at Sector-20 and brutally beaten. “By the time the police reached the place, I was slapped, punched and hit by people gathered there,” he said. The other boy, who was around 10, had fled home because of troubles in the family and landed in the hands of traffickers. This boy also hails from Maharajpur under Tiljhari police station of Jharkhand’s Sahebganj district, the same village the first boy belongs to. The police had taken him into custody for snatching a wallet at Sector 20. Describing his ordeal, he said, “I ran away from home because of abject poverty and alcoholic father. He used to beat me and my mother under the influence of toddy. I was brought to Delhi by an elderly woman whom we used to call as nani(grand mother). When I came here, she told me that I will get food only if I earn money. I was briefed what kind of cell phone I had to steal and how to do pick pocket and flee.” The two boys were handed over to FXB India Suraksha, a collaborative partner of Children Welfare Committee (CWC)-approved Childline India Foundation (CIF) – which works for street children in distress – in Noida and have been sent back to their homes. The children, mostly between 12 and 16, are brought to Delhi via Ranchi and trained for nearly one month on stealing wallets, cell phones and bags and identifying targets. They are assigned busy subways, tourist hot spots and crowded places. Once they are fully trained, they are sent at targeted places in groups of two to three with an assurance that they will not be prosecuted. Their male leaders keep their distance from the everyday operation so they would not be caught. The kids are trained to tell the police that they are 12 years old – an age at which criminal prosecution does not take place in India. Typically, most child pickpockets are under 14 years of age, as juvenile delinquency laws states that children of this age cannot be held accountable for their petty crimes. Usually, when law enforcement agencies arrest a child pickpocket and theft-related crime, he or she is that they are taken by police to child refuges – or child welfare group homes. Because they have nowhere to go that is safe they simply walk out the door the next day, only to return to commit more crimes the next day. The children are brought to Delhi via Ranchi by their fellow villagers known to them and their family. Once the innocent kinds reach here, they depend on the person for return who has brought them. They are then supplied to different organised crime syndicates based at Laxmi Nagar in Delhi and Khora Colony and Loni in Uttar Pradesh depending on the price the trafficker can get. “Trafficked persons have been victims of one or more serious criminal offences. They are committing such pity offences under compulsion, not by choice. As per the Juvenile Justice Act, they need care and protection and not treated as criminals. After an entry is made into the General Station Diary, the police give us the custody of such children. We locate and inform their parents, give them counselling and admit them in hospitals, if needed. Within 24 hours of their rescue, they are produced before CWC. If the CWC asks us, we also arrange home investigation report to ascertain that the child is going at right place,” FXB Programme Manager Satya Prakash told Firstpost. He added that in recent years, Jharkhand has emerged as a vulnerable state for trafficking of children and women. Thousands of trafficked children from the state are either forced to undertake a variety of criminal activities and begging or traded by placement agencies to domestic homes in Delhi. The trafficking affected districts are Lohardagga, Sahibganj, Kodarma, Girdih, Bokaro, Dhanbad, Palamu, Ranchi, Pakur and Dumka. “So far, we have rescued 15 children. We found a similarity in all cases. All of them were from Sahibganj. All the parents admitted that their children came to Delhi with someone known to them. It shows that the children were not kidnapped. All children are below 10 years,” he said adding that “only when the pattern was brought into its notice, the Noida police woke up and assured us it will investigate the case and catch the culprits”. He said when a child is rescued and his NGO gets his custody, the very next day a person (most of the time a lady) comes to them and demands the custody of the kids. Sometimes, even their lawyers come. “Their arrival with proper documentation creates doubts. In the first case, an elderly lady identified herself as nani claimed the custody of the child. We asked her to come the next day. Our team followed her and found that she lives somewhere near Loni border. Simililarly, the rest two were traced in Laxmi Nagar in Delhi and Khora colony in Noida. They produce a photograph in which the person who is claiming custody will be seen with the child in a group photograph. There carry residence proof of the child certified by the village chief. On closely observing, we found that the photograph is photo shopped. Every time, the name of the village chief attesting the residential proof was different,” he explained. He accused the Noida police of ignoring such an important case. “The police focus on big cases. The issues of children have always been ignored. In addition, cops do not keep record because the children are handed over to us after General Station Diary entry. No FIR is filed in this case. We informed the police that there is an organised racket. Children are used for smaller crimes because they won’t be imprisoned. We also let it know that all the rescued people belong to the same village and district back in Jahrkhand. We have got an assurance that the Crime Branch will investigate the case and that the kingpin will be arrested soon,” he added. Taking cognizance of the repeated cases, the police should have filed an FIR and investigate the matter. It should also reach out to the Jharkhand police to nab the culprits. The CWC should have directed the police and state governments to take up the case, he said. The Jharkhand Police have set up 25 Special Juvenile Police Units in all districts of the state. Sixteen ‘protection homes’ under Integrated Child Protection Scheme have been designated. In spite of receiving a grant under ICPS, the state of Jharkhand has not set up any of the Child Protection Units at the district level. Twenty four CWCs have been established but they continue to work without any infrastructure. Some of the CWCs have reported non payment of salaries. The documentation standards of CWC and ‘protection homes’ are dismal. The government has not initiated standard minimum care  and protection  for  victims.  Despite the huge amount of trafficking reported in the region, this continues to be treated as a migration problem and not as organised crime. Angry over the government’s apathy towards the issue, the Supreme Court had said on February 5, 2013, “Nobody seems to care about missing children. This is the irony.” Data on missing children put out by the home ministry last month in Parliament show that over 3.25 lakh children went missing between 2011 and 2014 (till June) at an average of nearly 1 lakh children going missing every year. On an average, 45% of them remaining untraced. In fact, National Crime Records Bureau deciphers the figures in India in terms of one child going missing in the country every eight minutes. More worryingly, 5 per cent of those missing are girls and 45 per cent of all missing children have remained untraceable as yet raising fears of them having been either killed or pushed into begging or prostitution rackets.