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By Max Martin
Human Rights Watch's report 'Future Forsaken: Abuses Against Children Affected by HIV/AIDS in India' tells a damning story about the number of children in India affected by HIV/AIDS and the discrimination they face in schools, at medical institutions and at home
Widespread discrimination against children with HIV in schools, medical facilities, orphanages, neighbourhoods and their own homes is fuelling the AIDS epidemic in India, says a new report by Human Rights Watch, a US-based charity.
“Doctors, both government and private, have refused to treat and sometimes even touch HIV-positive children,” says the report, titled ‘Future Forsaken: Abuses Against Children Affected by HIV/AIDS in India’, released in New Delhi on July 29.
“Discrimination, combined with corruption and a failing public health system, leaves many children living with HIV/AIDS without even the rudiments of healthcare.”
Often, children from families affected by AIDS are forced to drop out of school to care for sick parents or to work, or are orphaned. They are often pushed onto the streets, forced into the worst forms of child labour, or otherwise exploited, raising the HIV risk, the report says.
“If the Indian government is serious about fighting the country’s AIDS epidemic, it should stop ignoring children affected by AIDS and start protecting them from abuse,” said Zama Coursen-Neff, the report’s author and senior researcher with Human Rights Watch’s children’s rights division, in a press note.
In India, hundreds of thousands of children are living with HIV/AIDS, according to official statistics.
The Human Rights Watch report supports its claims with a few case studies of children living with HIV/AIDS.
Six-year-old Anu P’s teacher sent her home from kindergarten, telling her older sister to tell her not to return to school. Her grandfather, who had been caring for Anu and her siblings since their parents died of AIDS, was afraid that if he protested her elder sister might be sent home as well.
A nearby private doctor told Anu’s family not to bring the girl to his clinic, “because if you do, other people won’t come,” the report says.
Ten-year-old Sharmila A was HIV-positive and had lost both her parents to AIDS. She stopped going to school in the fourth grade. “When I went to school, I sat separately…on the last mat,” the report quotes Sharmila as saying. “The other children wanted to be with me, but the teacher would tell them not to play with me.”
Infected with tuberculosis and denied anti-retroviral drugs at a government hospital, Sharmila died in January 2004.
Among young children, transmission at birth is the most common source of the infection. However, children in India are also acquiring HIV through sexual contact, including sexual abuse, blood transfusions and unsterilised syringes sometimes used to inject narcotic drugs.
Most of those dying of AIDS are between 15 and 49 years old, the age when many are raising children. The number of AIDS orphans has not been adequately measured, but some calculate more than a million children under the age of 15 in India have lost one or both parents to AIDS.
“Although India’s HIV/AIDS policy has sorely neglected children, some government officials have started to speak out about the need to reach children who are seen to be ‘innocent victims’,” the report says.
The government has also begun several programmes designed to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child. “However, the exclusive focus on persons considered ‘high-risk’, and the moral judgement that has coloured the government’s response and, in turn, the public’s perception have obscured the situation of children,” the report adds.
Human Rights Watch has recommended that the Indian government:
- Make discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS illegal.
- Ensure that children living with HIV/AIDS receive all available medical care.
- Plan for the protection of children whose parents are unable to care for them, and prohibit institutions from discriminating against HIV/AIDS-affected children.
- Provide all children, both in and out of school, with age-appropriate information about HIV/AIDS.
Human Rights Watch conducted research for this report in 2003 in Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Delhi, and followed it up with queries from New York. The researchers spoke with more than 170 people, including 51 children.
(Max Martin is a freelance writer based in Bangalore)
InfoChange News & Features, August 2004
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