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Child Abuse

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Welcome Speech
‘At Home or Outside: How Safe is my Child?
23/1/13, ICG
A very good morning to all of you and a warm welcome to this seminar on ‘At Home or
Outside: How Safe is my Child?” Thank you for sparing your valuable time to be here to discuss and deliberate on an issue that is slowly making our society hollow and will cause a major collapse of all value systems if timely action is not taken.
It can be very difficult to talk about child abuse or more specifically child sexual abuse, which we are discussing today, and even more difficult to acknowledge that sexual abuse of children of all ages including infants happens every day. This has become the subject of great community concern and the focus of many legislative and …show more content…

The above-mentioned report for instance says, “One of the major problems in understanding the scope of the subject of 'child abuse ' is that it is extremely difficult to get responses from children on such a sensitive subject because of their inability to fully understand the different dimensions of child abuse and to talk about their experiences. It is therefore difficult to gather data on abused children.” Child

rights activists argue that the problem may not be the child’s inability to speak about sensitive subjects, as much as the lack of skills on the part of the questioners to create the environment and the trust required to enable the child to share his/her experiences.
Currently, the Indian Constitution recognises various crimes against children that are linked to their sexual abuse – The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act that protects children below the age of 16 from being used for the purposes of commercial sex. The Juvenile
Justice Act Section 26 (Exploitation of Juvenile or Child Employee) provides for punishment if a person procures a juvenile for hazardous employment. The Prohibition of
Child Marriage Act also makes punishable the practice of marrying girls under the age of
18 and boys under the age of 21. In addition to these legislations there is also a commission for the protection of the rights of children which inquires into various

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