Victims of Sexual Abuse Shunned by Families soon to get Shelter Homes

NEW DELHI: Jharkhand government is to set up shelter homes for unwed pregnant women and single mothers who have been rejected by their family members. The shelter homes will provide medical assistance and help them in getting rehabilitated, the state officials said.

The move came after a proposal was made to the state government by a Miracle India, a Delhi based NGO, in which they had demanded for the facilities for marginalized women. The NGO also had been running a shelter home earlier in the Simdega district of the state which had to be shut down because of state intervention as they alleged that it was being run without their permission.

"We had given shelter to more than 40 such women in Simdega. However, a similar shelter for such women with medical and counseling facilities is on the cards in Khunti,” said Mandeep Singh, the founder of the NGO to Hindustan Times.

“The department has been positive about the proposal."

Such shelter homes will be first of their kind in the state, being done on the lines of Swadhar scheme under HRD ministry, whose aim too is to “provide primary need of shelter, food, clothing and care to the marginalized women/girls living in difficult circumstances who are without any social and economic support,” as per their website, among others.

Jharkhand has been one of the states marked for being the hottest hub of human trafficking of women and children. There have a number of news in the past months when placement agencies were said to have lured these vulnerable individuals to cities, especially Delhi on the pretext of jobs and sold them to other predators.

More than 30,000 thousand girls are trafficked to cities from Jharkhand every year, according to an estimate, said an anti-trafficking activist to HT.

These girls are shunned by their family members when they become pregnant as a result of rape and then they are never with no option but to move to cities through the agents of placement agencies.