Sky News featured a story over the weekend on the alarming rise of gang-related child abduction in India, one of the world’s so-called emerging nations and one of the fastest growing economies.  Evidently the abduction of young Indian children has reached epidemic proportions with an estimated one child being taken every eight minutes. That works out at just under two hundred a day or a staggering fourteen hundred a week. Investigations have revealed that, once enslaved, the children are used as either cheap labour in one of the country’s thriving factories or as prostitutes.

The Indian government, not surprisingly, are extremely concerned by the situation and questions are being asked as to whether or not the police are doing all that they can to safeguard the welfare of their children. A national register has been set up with the idea of posting on it a photograph of every child in the country to assist in tracing anyone unfortunate enough to be abducted. It seems a good idea but how effective will it be in a country of over one billion people and with wide scale poverty among the lower classes, many of whom undoubtedly slip under the State’s radar?

Abuse of children has always seemed to me to be the worst type of human abuse since children are naturally so vulnerable, trusting, innocent and weak. Any State that cannot look after its most vulnerable members can barely refer to itself as civilised and I’m not singling out India here. Closer to home we have been faced with a barrage of tales concerning the late Sir Jimmy Savile and whilst, initially, there may have been doubt at the allegations made against him one year after his death their sheer volume can only lead one to the conclusion that here was a man of at least questionable behaviour but more likely, as many have claimed, a paedophile. I just hope that the investigation, and there will undoubtedly be a national enquiry, is calm and well balanced, concerning itself only with truth and fact and does not degenerate into a witch hunt.

In the meantime, all any of us can do is to educate and alert our children to the dangers of the world, to warn them against the wiles of some adults, not just strangers, and to encourage in them the use of common sense. We mustn’t overdo it though because there is still a lot of good in the world and a sizeable majority of people are undoubtedly thoughtful, decent and kind. It would not be right to bring up a new generation of untrusting, hard-faced, bitter, cynics. No, that’ll come soon enough with middle-age!

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