Dilemmas in Rescue and Reintegration: A critical assessment of India’s policies for children trafficked for labour exploitation

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the Indian government’s efforts to combat pervasive child trafficking for labour exploitation through rescue and reintegration of affected children. It evaluates the extensive policy and legal frameworks against on-the-ground realities in the states of Bihar and Rajasthan, using empirical findings from a qualitative study carried out by the FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University. The results demonstrate that current practices fail to adhere to human rights norms or protect rescued children from risk of future exploitation. They underscore important challenges in the rescue and reintegration of trafficked children, and call into question the singular focus on this category of post-harm response over preventative interventions. The findings point to a critical need for future research, sustained multi-stakeholder discussion and concrete reforms

Climate change is a threat multiplier for violence against children

Background: The climate crisis is the biggest threat to the health, development, and wellbeing of the current and future generations. While there is extensive evidence on the direct impacts of climate change on human livelihood, there is little evidence on how children and young people are affected, and even less discussion and evidence on how the climate crisis could affect violence against children. Participants and setting: In this commentary, we review selected research to assess the links between the climate crisis and violence against children. Methods: We employ a social-ecological perspective as an overarching framework to organize findings from the literature and call attention to increased violence against children as a specific, yet under-examined, direct and indirect consequence of the climate crisis. Results: Using such a perspective, we examine how the climate crisis exacerbates the risk of violence against children at the continually intersecting and interacting levels of society, community, family, and the individual levels. We propose increased risk of armed conflict, forced displacement, poverty, income inequality, disruptions in critical health and social services, and mental health problems as key mechanisms linking the climate crisis and heightened risk of violence against children. Furthermore, we posit that the climate crisis serves as a threat multiplier, compounding existing vulnerabilities and inequities within populations and having harsher consequences in settings, communities, households, and for children already experiencing adversities. Conclusions: We conclude with a call for urgent efforts from researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to further investigate the specific empirical links between the climate crisis and violence against children and to design, test, implement, fund, and scale evidence-based, rights-based, and child friendly prevention, support, and response strategies to address violence against children