Juvenile, Not Delinquent Children in Conflict with the Law

DeScriPtionThe past decade has seen an insidious and unforgiving position take root on thepurpose of juvenile justice in India, seen as it is-especially in the aftermath ofthe Nirbhaya case in 2012-as an instrument of punishment and not of reform.The desire to make the law retributive and not compassionate stems from whatone of the authors calls 'the blindness of privilege'. This book offers a muchneeded critique of such a skewed understanding of the law, pulling us out of ourcomfort zone, and confronting us with the grim reality of India's juvenile justicesystem.The authors write from long years of experience of working with 'Children inConflict with Law', or CICL, as the Juvenile Justice Act terms offending minors.In the first part of the book, noted child rights activist Enakshi Ganguly discussesnot only the history and evolution of the law in India-from the colonial periodto the present-but also its pitfalls and the often overwhelming problems indealing with the system. The second part of the book contains two poignantfirst-person accounts of working among the CICL by Kalpana Purushothaman, a trained psychologist and a member of a Juvenile Justice Board in Karnataka, and Puneeta Roy, who translates her skills in expressive arts into offering toolsto interned children for self-empowerment and healing. The personal anecdotesand case studies they share, and the sheer resilience of their optimism, challengethe deeply biased assumptions that prevent us from seeing the child behind theoffender and which perpetuate injustice against this most vulnerable of groups.