About Access to Justice for Children

Delayed justice delivery perpetuates the crime against the victim.

 

When crimes are committed against children, the wait for justice can be unbearably long. This delay prolongs the trauma for the victims as well as their families by affecting them psychologically, socially, and economically.

 

By the end of 2022, almost 20,000 cases of child sexual abuse were awaiting police investigation, and almost 240,000 cases were awaiting trial. While the police investigation backlog remained static between 2021-2022, the court backlog has gone up by 15%.

 

Across all crimes against children, the court backlog stood at 541,800 by the end of 2022 - an increase of 11% on the previous year.

 

More than half a million children are not only awaiting justice, but also compensation and proper rehabilitation, which in India is their statutory right.

 

Poor implementation of the law, denied registration of cases, delay in compensation and completion of investigations, prolonged trials, and revictimization during the legal process create an environment where the victims and parents feel disempowered, allowing the perpetrators to continue with impunity, and creating scant deterrence against the crime. Only by swiftly providing a support system of reparation, rehabilitation, and reintegration for the survivors and their families will belief in the system be strengthened.

 

Deterrence of the law is not in the severity of punishment but in the certainty of it. It is critical to end the feeling of impunity that too many perpetrators have.

 

About the program

 

Access to Justice for Children is a landmark program that aims to end child exploitation across India by enabling a child protection ecosystem that prevents crimes against children and fights for justice for survivors and their families.

 

The program strives to bring the behavioral and systemic changes required for a lasting, sustainable impact on child protection issues - child marriage, child trafficking, child labor, and child sexual abuse including online - through legal deterrence and community awareness.

 

This partner-driven program is breaking new ground for child protection everyday by:

• Putting India's child protection laws into practice to increase the number of cases of trafficking and child sexual abuse which are registered and heard in court, and increase the rate of convictions

• Identifying child traffickers, stopping trafficking as it happens, and rescuing children who have been trafficked into exploitation with the support of law enforcement agencies

• Providing tens of thousands of children with rehabilitative counseling, enabling their access to statutory compensation for registering the crimes committed against them, and claiming back wages for child laborers

• Tracking online child trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation, and sexual abuse through new technologies to secure evidence and bring perpetrators to justice

• Preventing child marriage, child sexual abuse, and trafficking for labor and sexual exploitation from the ground up, through community engagement and training of police and child protection staff

• Engaging survivors to participate as leaders in the program through innovative interventions to protect children from exploitation