Corporal Punishment and Violence in Institutions

The offences the 2015 Act created against children, including the two nobody teaches: the child beaten in a children's home and the child recruited by a militant group.

In the wording a student can write in an exam, taking the offences in turn.

Section 75 punishes whoever, having the actual charge of, or control over, a child, assaults, abandons, abuses, exposes or wilfully neglects the child, in a manner likely to cause unnecessary mental or physical suffering, with imprisonment up to three years or a fine of one lakh rupees, rising to rigorous imprisonment up to five years where the offender is employed by or manages an organisation entrusted with the care of the child, and to rigorous imprisonment of not less than three years and up to ten where the child is physically incapacitated, develops a mental illness or is put at risk to life or limb.

Section 76 punishes employing or using a child for begging with up to five years, and with rigorous imprisonment of not less than seven years and up to ten where the person amputates or maims the child. Section 77 punishes giving a child intoxicating liquor, a narcotic drug, tobacco products or a psychotropic substance with rigorous imprisonment up to seven years.

Section 82 punishes corporal punishment in a child care institution with a fine of ten thousand rupees on the first conviction, imprisonment up to three months on a subsequent one, dismissal from service and a bar on working with children, and imprisonment of not less than three years for a management that does not cooperate with an inquiry. Section 83 punishes a declared militant group that recruits or uses a child, and any adult or adult group that uses children for illegal activities, with rigorous imprisonment up to seven years and a fine of five lakh rupees. Section 74 forbids disclosure of a child's identity, punishable with six months or a fine of two lakh rupees.

Why it is in a paper on violence

Because these are the offences that describe violence inside the institutions the State itself creates. A children's home, an observation home, a place of safety and a special home exist because a court sent a child there. When the person in charge of such a home beats the child, the violence is not merely private. It is done by an agent of a system that took custody of the child in the child's own interest, and the 2015 Act is where Parliament finally admitted it happens.

The wider point for this module is that these sections mark out the whole field of violence against a child. Cruelty by a custodian in section 75, exploitation in sections 76 and 77, institutional violence in section 82, and the child conscripted into political violence in section 83. Read together they are a small code of violence against the weaker section that topic 4 names first.