Abstract:
Children are considered to be a vulnerable section of society due to initial years of an
individual are their formative years as well as the years where their behaviour is also
suggestible to their surrounding and circumstances at a higher incidence than adults.
Multitude of children are subject to violent atmospheres at their households due to weak
familial structures and many of the children who end up committing crimes or getting caught
up in situations which are out of their control, yet they due to such activities result in them
being arrested and being detained by the state authorities. Their immature understanding of
the acts and offences they commit also is brought out in many studies over the years, due to
which a separate juvenile justice system was set up for addressing children who end up
committing crimes.
Many of the children who come into the juvenile justice system as juveniles in conflict with
the law in Delhi belong to economically weaker sections, and are residents of slums and
informal settlements of the city. The children who are detained on commission of crime have
poor socio-economic backgrounds, have not finished their primary education, have dropped
out from school, are engaged in criminal activities, most often in groups or „gangs‟, such as
gambling, smoking, consuming drugs and other such „delinquent‟ or criminal behaviour. It
becomes necessary to understand the children‟s experiences upon coming into contact with
the juvenile justice system, the circumstances surrounding the commission of their crime, the
influence of peer groups and the activities undertaken by the individual in the group in the
living experience of the child.
The functioning of the system itself needs an appraisal with an understanding of the practices
of rehabilitation and reintegration. The follow-up on the children who leave the system and
dearth community-based support for ex-addicts and CCLs is also a matter of concern.
