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Dalit girl of Theni village escapes from “hell” in spinning mill (The Hindu)
The girl, employed by a spinning mill was brutally attacked by the mill owners after trying to escape – says NGO demanding the arrest of the owners.
A Rapist’s Nightmare – Dalit girls fights for justice (The New York Times)
Bitiya, who is from the bottom of the caste system, is fuzzy about her age but thinks she was 13 in 2012 when four upper-caste village men grabbed her as she worked in a field, stripped her and raped her. They filmed the assault and warned her that if she told anyone they would release the video and also kill her brother. So Bitiya initially kept quiet. Six weeks later Bitiya’s father saw a 15-year-old boy watching a pornographic video — and was aghast to see his daughter in it. The men were selling the video in a local store for a dollar a copy. Bitiya is crying in the video and is held down by the men, so her family accepted that she was blameless. Her father went to the police to file a report. Nicholas Kristof/The New York Times
Watch: Teacher thrashing boy mercilessly in Karnataka (Zee News)
Indian sisters told they will be repeatedly gang-raped as punishment for their brother’s crime launch appeal at Supreme Court (The Independent)
Two sisters to be raped as punishment for brothers inter-caste relationship – demand justice (Amnesty International appeal and petition)
49% of Haryana’s dalit kids are malnourished: Report (The Times of India)
New child labour law will hit girls, dalits and OBCs most (Hindustan Times)
Mahadalit children driven out of school in Biharsharif (Times of India)
Are we still in dark age? Children of cobblers treated like dirt (The Daily Star – Bangladesh)
Dalits students forced to eat separately | The Asian Age
Millions of Indian children are being denied school education due to discrimination (Scroll.in by Jayshree Bajoria – Human Rights Watch)
Are we still in dark age? Children of cobblers treated like dirt in Magura school (Parittran)
Ten-year-olds are made to clean their school toilets by the teachers. The elders in their families cannot have tea at local stalls or a haircut at the barber’s, and they are not invited to any social event. All these because they are from a caste considered low in the local Hindu community.
Dalit child beaten and Dalits attacked by 50 men because a child’s ball fell into an RSS (dominant caste) campus – police neglect to protect (Scroll.in)
It is hard to say what left a bigger scar on the Dalit residents of Rajendra Nagar locality in Sonepat recently: a violent attack on them by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh men that injured over a dozen people, or the compromise they were driven to sign promising not to seek any legal remedy against their assailants.
India’s child labour ‘reforms’ could make it a dangerous place to invest – Guardian Op-ed by Aidan McQuade – Anti-Slavery
Government signals plan to stimulate economic growth by removing basic protections for workers and ending ban on child labour
Dalits Still Working in Bonded Labour in the Cotton Industry Despite Some Improvements, New Report Finds (IDSN, 2012, News)
How the Right to Education is failing the very children it was meant to benefit (Scrool.in)
More than 75% of those out of schools are either Dalits, Adivasis or Muslims.Over 32% of those out of schools are Dalits and over 16% belong to the Adivasi communities. On further bifurcation, 3.24% of all Scheduled Castes and over 4% of all Scheduled Tribes children are out of school nationwide. This divide gets even bigger in the eastern region where more than 6.78% of ST children are out of school and in Odisha the figure is a whopping 14.81%.
Diluting India’s child labour law will trap families in cycle of poverty (Op-ed in The Guardian – by IDSN and DNN)
An amendment to the act that was set to make child labour illegal will push millions of marginalised children in India into work rather than education
Shame! Dalit girl set on fire for pursuing education (Yahoo News India)
As per the victim’s statement to the police, the student was alone in her hut and cooking food when the accused— Dhiraj Yadav, his brothers Arvind and Dinesh, and their father Ram Pravesh Yadav— barged in, dragged her out, poured kerosene on her and set her on fire. “They didn’t like that I was pursuing my education because they were failing in school every year. A few months ago, Dhiraj somehow got a photograph of me and tried to blackmail me. A major altercation broke out between our families on the issue,” she was quoted as saying to the police in the community health centre. The victim was admitted with 70 per cent burn injuries.
Combatting the Vicious Circle of Child Rights Violation (The New Indian Express)
With widespread caste discrimination and branding of communities, the effect on the rights of children can be seen in instances across the country — Dalit children being made to sweep classrooms and clean toilets at schools, eat separately and face neglect. The constant branding by teachers and classmates as the ‘other’, besides affecting the psyche of the child has been shown to increase the number of dropouts and the cycle goes on — child labour, drug abuse, alcoholism and crime. The issue of child rights is universal but the discrimination is more in India because of the socio-religious philosophy that facilitates discrimination on the basis of caste, believes social activist Vasanthi Devi, former chairperson, Institute for Human Rights Education. “Dalit children have special needs and this is not accepted by most people. Children in schools face the same issues the adults of the caste face, ” said N Thayalan, director of Human Resource Development Foundation (HRDF). Pallar, Paraiyar, and Arunthathiyar are the major Dalit groups in the State. A 2010 survey was conducted among 200 Arunthathiyar families, the group engaged in manual scavenging and considered lowest, the ‘Dalits among Dalits’. This survey conducted by the Arunthathiyar Human Rights Forum revealed that 24 per cent of children dropped out from schools, starting from Class 1 and reaching a maximum at Class 8. The top reason given by students for dropping out was slow learning followed by peer group influence, family incompetence, teachers’ attitude and a difficult syllabus.