Photo Courtesy: nenow
Guwahati: Jorhat police pulled an eight-year-old girl from Dergaon on Wednesday, September 2. Kidnappers snatched the child from Mariani on the evening of September 1. A team from the Child Development and Special Police, alongside the Mariani station officer, handled the rescue. The girl is now home with her parents.
This rescue followed a major operation the day before. Mariani police found three other children, aged six, seven, and nine, on August 31. Those children vanished on August 30. The Government Railway Police and the Railway Protection Force tracked the trio to Tinsukia. They returned the children to their guardians.
These back-to-back incidents reveal growing dangers. Official numbers confirm a troubling trend. Crime data shows cases against children in Assam hit 10,174 in 2023. That is a 149 percent jump from the 4,084 cases recorded in 2022. Between 2014 and 2023, reported offenses climbed by roughly 634 percent.
National statistics paint a grim picture. Kidnapping and abduction accounted for 45 percent of all reported crimes against children across India in 2023. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act made up another 38.2 percent of cases. Authorities tracked 79,884 kidnapping cases nationwide last year. Of those, "14,637 cases involved minor girls who were allegedly abducted with the intention of forcing them into marriage." The numbers confirm why officials remain worried.
Updated at 3rd September 2026 at 10:00pm
The issue of child safety hits home with a legal crackdown in another district. The Kokrajhar Sessions Court sentenced 35-year-old Ram Kujur to 20 years of hard labor this Thursday. Kujur raped a 14-year-old girl at her home on June 29, 2023. The judge slapped him with a 50,000 rupee fine, adding six months of jail time if he fails to pay.
Official records fill in the gaps on how bad things have gotten over the last decade. Reported crimes against children in the state sat at 1,385 in 2014. The tally crawled up to 6,608 by 2019. Reports dipped to 4,622 during the pandemic year of 2020, bounced to 5,282 in 2021, and hit 4,084 in 2022 before the massive 2023 spike.
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