CHILD PROTECTION LAW OF NORWAY. WHY IT IS SO STRINGENT?

It was a Sunday afternoon and we all in the Family were watching the movie Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway (Netflix). It led us to an animated discussion as the movie left asking ourselves why the laws are so stringent on child care in Norway ?

Film Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway was released on March 17, 2023. The Hindi language movie is directed by Ashima Chibber and it is an Emmey Entertainment, Zee Studios production based on the real-life account of an immigrant Indian mother who battled against an entire country to take custody of her own kids.

Sagarika Chakraborty, based on whom the movie has been made, has authored an autobiography The Journey of a Mother narrating her legal battle. The book has details of the struggle of Sagarika when her world came crashing down, few years after she became mom to two kids, as Norwegian government forcibly removed them from her care. The book was published in 2022. It is a sordid drama of enacting a law which never stood ground on any part of the world other than the Scandinavian countries. But why it is so ?

Linda Pressly of BBC World Service, Tysfjord summarises why the law happened. March 2018. Norwegian police have documented 151 cases of sexual abuse, including child rape, in one small community of 2,000 people, north of the Arctic circle. The offences occurred over decades - between the 1950s and 2017 - but were only recently uncovered. How could such serious sex crimes go unchecked for so long?

One of the victims, Nina Iversen, says she has always been someone who talks - and has often talked about what happened to her when she was growing up in Tysfjord.

I always spoke about it. From when I was 14 years old, I thought I'll write a book about this abuse - I'm going to stop it. But of course, I wasn't able to.

I told everyone, she says. But to be listened to, you had to have the right background. Someone like me, who comes from a poor family, just got ignored.

When she was a teenager, young people confided in each other about the sexual abuse they had experienced, but adults would not listen.

We were called whores and liars. There were many of us who were treated like that. And we were spat on if we tried to talk about it, she remembers.

Iversen's abusers were her relatives, so as a child she lived family life in a perpetual state of terror. Now 49, she no longer lives in Tysfjord, but says she still doesn't feel safe.

Tysfjord. A remote community dominated by a 900m-deep fjord, Tysfjord is split in two - one part, Drag, lies on the western shore, and the other, Kjopsvik, on the eastern. A car ferry ploughs its way back and forth between the two.

About half of those living here are from the indigenous Sami community - some of Scandinavia's earliest inhabitants, who live in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. But Sami people accounted for about two-thirds of the 83 victims and 92 perpetrators identified in the police report on sexual abuse, and discrimination and racism had an impact on how the story played out.

Shock. So, it is child abuse, child abduction, child pornography, female abuse and female prostitution all rolled in one. Did the authorities go overboard in case of Mrs. Chatterjee ?

What we saw in the film. Did Mrs. Chatterjee, who was a loving mother, deserve the forcible takeover of her children by the Child Protection Authorities ? Definitely not.

Ei, eta ki hoche ? We were not amused by the way the guys romped into the Chatterjee house and snatched the children from the mother. We all know the Mother is universal across the World !! La madre es universal en todo el mundo !

Misuse of Law. The Norwegian authorities took the children from Mrs. Chatterjee because – what later in court the officers spoke in front of the Norwegian Judge – they felt the mother was not breast-feeding the younger child and she was not capable of parenting the two children.

Relief at Indian court. Finally, Mrs. Chatterjee knocked the Indian courts and in spite of best efforts from the Norwegian government to bring the children back to Norway – they had sent a representation to India to fight the case, as the Judge was not smitten by greed or otherwise - Mrs Chatterjee got her children back which forced the husband and his Family to back out.

Now, let us talk about the Norwegian laws, what are they doing.

Norwegian Ministry of Children and Equality The Rights of the Child in Norway, 2016 : a United Nations Initiative. Article 347, Investigation - which says,

Amendments were approved in 2016 that expand the police’s ability to use coercive means, including monitoring communications and reading data, when investigating cases of serious human smuggling, human trafficking, deprivation of liberty, and images of child abuse.

Article 357 says - Extradition and mutual legal assistance in criminal matters. Norway participates in extensive cooperation on extradition, including in cases involving the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. Norway also actively contributes to fighting crime through other types of mutual legal assistance in criminal matters.

So yes, the laws are there and for good reasons, though the execution is left much to be desired. Mrs. Sagarika Chakraborty – on whom the film is based – was left literally crying for help in Norway but no officer was upright enough to understand that the immigrant mother and her behavioural pattern towards their children could be different from that of a Scandinavian mother. Do you agree ?

But how India fares on these parameters(?).

India's police and other law enforcement agencies are using a US-based centralised reporting system on child pornography and child sexual abuse for dealing with cases related to them in the country and nab the offenders.

The access to one lakh-plus Tipline reports prepared by America's National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has helped check the growing number of cases of child pornography and child sexual abuse across the country.

When a citizen gives a tip about a crime to law enforcement agencies through a dedicated number or website, it automatically gets converted into a report for action making it as 'Tipline report.' The agencies never ask the caller's name or any other identity, and he or she can remain anonymous.

But it is not enough !!

United Nations unveils a global index every year to know which nation is doing what regarding child care.

Kids Rights. The KidsRights Index is an initiative of the KidsRights Foundation, in cooperation with Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Economics and the International Institute of Social Studies. It comprises a ranking of all UN member states that have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and for which sufficient data is available, as of 2023 a total of 193 countries are part of the Index.

Data collection and analysis presents a complex and gloomy picture across the world. This year Sweden has jumped to number one overtaking Iceland who held numero uno slot for the past four years !! The KidsRight Report 2023 shows that under-5 mortality rates have risen in Madagascar and Niger. Likewise, the rates of child labour have tripled in some countries including Belarus, Colombia and Venezuela.

Norway is ranked 9th, Denmark 7th and India 115th. Sweden is followed by Finland at 2nd, Iceland at 3rd, Luxemburg at 4th and Germany at 5th.

Urge to strengthen profits takes the English kids to the gallows. New children’s care homes are being disproportionately placed in cheaper and more deprived parts of England, according to a report from the Guardian.

Over the past five years the number of children’s care homes located in areas with the cheapest house sale prices has risen almost three times faster than in the most expensive places. Among the regions with big increases in homes was the north-west, including in parts of Blackpool and Burnley and other northern cities such as Bradford. Children’s services directors warned that the trends were driven by the blatant profiteering of private care providers, targeting cheap housing and local labour.

Likewise, India with other economically vibrant countries have a lot to do to ensure the children are protected and taken care of. If India is hitting demographic sweet spot, care for children is inherent to the blossoming of the Nation as we strive to be one !!

Norway’s obsession with Child Protection Laws is painful and at times bereft of common sense. It is high time the country mends its laws so that we do not get the opportunity to witness another Mrs. Chatterjee’s plight so poignantly described in the film.

Respect. With all due respect to the Nina Iversen’s, Mrs. Chatterjee’s and the Sagarika Chakraborty’s of the world we are utterly disappointed to see these brutalities and hope the new laws are going in the right direction and the day is not far off when Nina will no longer live in fear and mothers would not hesitate to travel to Norway and other countries with their children !!

Especially Indian mothers.

From the Author : Dear reader, please go through the global map shown in this article and ascertain if your country needs more laws to protect the children. Thank you.