Teen-age children in Kozhikode getting disappeared from houses has horrified the Kerala police, alarming them of the possibility of children’s association with nefarious activities including drug pushing and dangerous stunts.
Though the night patrolling team and flying squad have spotted several teenagers, some doing stunts on empty roads and some roaming around the beaches, the responsibility would be now shifted to the juvenile police to tackle the issue, first with their parents.
Home department also feels that converting more police stations in the state into child-friendly stations would help in better dealing with the issues involving children. Currently, the state has only six child-friendly police stations and this would soon be spread to 60 stations soon.
The officers who spotted the teenagers at night stated that most of them had been doing it on a regular basis without the knowledge of their families. Some even said that the parents ‘did not seem interested in the extra care we showed by taking the children back home late night’. Though Student Police Cadets (SPC) and other projects like Our Responsibility to Children (ORC) are on the track to track the ‘problem kids’, at the implementation level, both the projects have so far failed to take off.
The intervention of SPC is more in the form of identifying students who have a tendency to roam around at night and involve in anti-social activities, said P Vijayan, IPS, the State Nodal Officer for the SPC Project.. “Officials at the ORC unit can do a better role, since they deal with the families of children in conflicts with law. The ORC was formed in the state on the basis of similar incidents in Kozhikode in the past. Parents are not aware where their kids are going at night, because they come out after ensuring that everyone is asleep. They do not even start the bikes on the premises of the house, so that the other family members do not hear the sound.
“Currently 52,000 students are associated with the SPC project. But ORC and SPC should reach maximum number of schools. The presence of SPC in Kerala schools is still less than 25 per cent. Financial constraints are mainly preventing the schools from starting SPC units. To establish a unit in a school, it needs around Rs 2.5 to 3 lakh, in addition to the training from the police. To create awareness and bring full result from the project, we need to have them in all the schools,” the official said.
