In India, an estimated 96,000 children go missing each year. It is said that every hour, an average of 12 children go missing across India. Every day that average is 200 children missing. Half of them remain untraced. Experts in the field claim that there is ample proof to show that after the pandemic, child trafficking has increased manifold. Truly, news of missing children is disturbing. If you are a parent of a young child, it is even more heart-wrenching. Imagine your own child gone missing – you don’t know where she is and you don’t know if you’ll ever find her again. How tragic could that be? The recent news of alleged child lifters being detained in Dimapur has alarmed us all. The fact that the Department of School Education itself has issued riders to all the schools in Nagaland to take precautionary measures to prevent child lifting is proof that the issue is real. Child trafficking is also real. However, the issue of missing children is complex. Not all children in the ‘missing’ database were trafficked.
Most of the children who go missing leave their homes on their own. Yes, there are incidents of kidnapping and trafficking. It is reported that, though kept under wraps, powerful people ‘kidnap’ the children of helpless borrowers as ‘mortgage’ because they couldn’t repay their loans. As opposed to the common belief that child kidnapping is always about ransom, where the victim is usually a wealthy family, we have come to the situation where the wealthy kidnap the poor. However, to understand the real issue of missing children, one must look at the underlying reasons. Most of the children reported missing are from dysfunctional families – homes where the child is not safe. The parents are the real culprits here. They are responsible for forcing the children to run away from their home. Here, not all children run away – they become parentified children. Parentification is a form of invisible childhood trauma which occurs when the roles between a child and a parent are reversed. A parentified child is a child who is forced to step up as the caretaker, mediator, or protector of the family.
Parentified children are robbed of their childhood by their own parents as they are made to look after immature, self-absorbed parents who never grew up themselves. Children of dysfunctional homes, where the parents are the real culprits, either run away or become parentified children. Either way, the children lose.
Apart from the children that are trafficked, kidnapped or stolen, we must also feel for those whose parents are stealing their childhood. Such children are ‘missing children’ too. Parenting is a sacred responsibility, a lifetime commitment. If a parent is not able to offer a safe home to his child, he is as good as the culprit in a missing children crime.
