In 30 days, ‘208 children have gone missing’

Chennai

The exclusive State Crime Records Bureau statistics available with DTNext had shown that 656 children aged between 0-15 years had gone missing from Tamil Nadu in the year of 2015, compared to 441 in 2014.

The website shows that in the last one month alone, 208 children aged between 0-17 have gone missing in Tamil Nadu and only 72 of them have been traced by the police. The SCRB data on missing children, aged between 0-17 shows that 1,018 children had gone missing in TN in  2015, out of which 656 were aged between 0-15 years and 305 of them girls.

However, the data about the missing children for the last 30 days in Tamil Nadu available with the SCRB matches with that of the website. As per SCRB data, 210 children aged between 0-17 went missing from Tamil Nadu between March 6 and April 6 this year.

“Missing of children between the age of 0-15 is more serious. We have found out that teenage children, aged between 16 and 17 years leave their houses on their own. But they also are at the  grave risk of being exploited by the sex rackets active in the state,” a senior police official said.

According to highly placed sources, the state police is preparing its report, to be submitted to the National Human Rights Commission, following a direction from the commission that took a suo moto case based on a report in DTNext on March 23.

“In July, 2007 the National Human Rights Commission had sent recommendations guidelines to the state police to curb the prevailing problem of missing children. The commission had then suggested special measures to fast track the investigation into the cases of child missing and suggested that every police station should have  a special squad missing persons’ desk. Now such facilities are defunct in most of the stations,” the official added.

The official said the state police chief had sought status update on such facilities across the stations so that they can prepare a convincing reply to the NHRC.