KOLKATA: When the West Bengal Commission for Child Rights constituted a child committee — run by children themselves — for wards 65 and 66 with the intention to understand domestic violence, its results left them stunned. According to commission member Sudeshna Roy , 90% of respondents pointed to family members when asked whom they feared the most or who physically assaulted them.But then, as development economists A K Shiva Kumar and Soumya Kapoor Mehta argued in their research, seven out of eight children, across the world, face some kind of violence, mostly at home. A detailed report from 2017 — ‘Ending Violence In Childhood’ — prepared by independent global initiative Know Violence In Childhood was discussed by the researchers at Jadavpur University on Monday. The department of Sociology, JU and Indian Sociological Society were the joint organizers. Shiva Kumar was the global co-chair of the project.Talking about the findings, Kumar said they found that globally, 60%-70% of children aged between 2 and 14 experience violence at the hands of caregivers or other household members. It is higher in younger age groups, with 55%-60% experiencing physical violence from a caregiver or household member at age two. Most children — three out of four under 14 — have experienced violent disciplining.Similarly, the role of ‘school-sanctioned’ violence was alarming. The report states how an estimated 261 million children reported that they were affected by physical fights and bullying in schools.Mehta pointed to the conditions in India, sometimes drawing references to Bengal and Kolkata in particular. Stating that seven out of 10 children in India have reported physical abuse, she said 86% of them reported violence being inflicted at home, 65% said they were beaten up and 56% said they were physically harmed at welfare institutes.“The worst was that 53% children said they had been sexually abused. In those cases, 61% of the accused were family members, neighbours or teachers,” Mehta said.According to both Kumar and Mehta, there are three broad categories of response to this issue — enhancing individual capabilities (like teaching children and parents to not keep silent), embedding violence prevention at institutions and services like creating family-based alternatives to institutional care and transforming the school culture.

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