In June 2004, a complaint about missing girls led lawyer Bhuwan Ribhu to a rescue operation in Uttar Pradesh, where he and his team were badly beaten. They managed to escape with the help of journalists, but Ribhu subsequently filed a habeas corpus petition before the Allahabad High Court, which resulted in all 29 girls being found.
The girls had been brought from Nepal through deception and promises. They were being held in conditions of exploitation and were also being sexually exploited.
For Ribhu, the incident exposed a much larger problem. India’s Constitution prohibited trafficking under Article 23, but there was no substantive and concrete criminal law dealing with all aspects of trafficking. At the time, trafficking of children for forced labour was viewed through the lens of poverty and social justice. Ribhu challenged this notion through both law and the principle that trafficking is an organised crime and a process that results in exploitation. Unless we curb the process that results in exploitation, we cannot end exploitation.
Whether for prostitution, sexual exploitation, bonded labour or child labour, trafficking is the process that must be outlawed so that the entire chain of demand and supply is disrupted.
The Rescue That Sparked a Larger Fight
In December 2004, Ribhu set up the Save The Childhood Foundation with one objective: to bring the process of trafficking within the ambit of the Indian Penal Code. This eventually found expression through the Supreme Court’s interventions, the Justice JS Verma Committee and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013.
Ribhu applied the same principle to missing children: the state had to recognise the possibility of a crime and act before a child disappeared into exploitation.
In 2006, the Nithari disappearances exposed a devastating failure of the system. Parents came looking for help after their children went missing. The larger problem was that a missing child was not always treated as the possible victim of a crime. The discovery of the children’s bodies made the consequences of institutional inaction impossible to ignore.
Ribhu insisted on a fundamental change in how the state viewed a missing child. A child who disappears should be treated as a potential victim of kidnapping or trafficking.
In 2013, the Supreme Court ordered that every complaint of a missing child be filed and investigated promptly. The Court also laid down a presumption of abduction or trafficking unless the investigation established otherwise. This resulted in more than 100,000 children not going missing in India each year.
In 2011, Ribhu petitioned for a clear definition of human trafficking. The Supreme Court recognised trafficking in terms of recruitment, transportation or harbouring through coercion, deception or force for the purpose of exploitation. This paved the way for the introduction of Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code in 2013, which provided a statutory framework for the offence of trafficking in persons.
Making the State Accountable for Missing Children
Ribhu’s work extended to the wider architecture of child protection. He assisted the Justice J.S. Verma Committee following the 2012 Delhi gang rape and argued that sexual violence had to be understood as part of a wider continuum of exploitation, beginning much earlier with offences and vulnerabilities such as stalking, voyeurism, trafficking and the disappearance of children.
Across these interventions, one philosophy was clear: the right and wrong of a society cannot be left to social custom or convenience. Principles have to be settled through law and policy.
The next battle was child marriage, where the same question returned with even greater force: what does it take for the law to truly protect a child?
Using the Law to Challenge Child Marriage
Many years ago, Ribhu received a call from a police officer in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands about a girl who was desperately trying to stop her own child marriage. The police intervened and the wedding was stopped. A few days later, the girl was forcibly taken to Chennai, married off. At the time sexual intercourse by a husband with his minor wife was not recognised as rape, but she did not want to pursue legal action.
In 2015, he approached the Supreme Court seeking recognition of sexual intercourse with a child within marriage as an offence of aggravated penetrative sexual assault under POCSO. In October 2017, the Court ruled that sexual intercourse by a man with his minor wife amounts to rape. Ribhu also worked on amendments to the Juvenile Justice framework so that a child at imminent risk of marriage could be treated as a child in need of care and protection, allowing the state to intervene before the marriage took place.
But legal reform alone cannot end child marriage. The principles of protection have to be established through law and policy, but society also needs a mechanism to put those principles into action.
Just Rights for Children (JRC) grew from that conviction. A single organisation can do only so much when the problem spans geographies and cuts across different levels of society. Today, JRC is a network of more than 250 civil society organisations working across 782 districts, united by a common commitment to protecting children through the rule of law. Its strength lies in taking this collective effort to the scale at which the problem exists.
The network primarily works on four issues: child marriage, child labour, child trafficking and child sexual abuse, both online and offline. Its approach rests on prevention before protection, protection before prosecution, and prosecution to create deterrence for prevention.
That means working with communities to identify risks; supporting governments and law enforcement to prevent and investigate crimes; strengthening accountability; helping vulnerable families access welfare schemes; supporting children through legal processes and rehabilitation; and using strategic litigation and advocacy to strengthen laws, policies and systems.
The broader strategy is captured in the PICKET framework: Policy, Investment, Capacity and Convergence, Knowledge and awareness, Economics, and Technology.
For Ribhu, the goal is not simply to rescue more children. It is to create conditions in which fewer children need to be rescued in the first place. That is particularly true of child marriage.
The 2030 Tipping Point: Making India Child Marriage-Free
He believes India can reach a tipping point by 2030, with the prevalence of child marriage falling below 6 per cent. Over the past three years, JRC partners have worked with governments, law enforcement agencies and communities to prevent and stop more than 5.5 lakh child marriages in the country.
The JRC-led Child Marriage Free India campaign gained national momentum when the Government of India launched Bal Vivah Mukt Bharat on November 27, 2024, with the goal of making India child marriage free by 2030. The campaign brought the issue firmly into the national policy and public action agenda.
The idea has since travelled beyond India. The Child Marriage Free World campaign, led by JRC, has reached more than 90 countries. Ribhu has called for an International Day for the Elimination of Child Marriage and remains hopeful that it will bring sustained global attention, political commitment and accountability to ending this crime against children.
The Logical Indian Perspective
Bhuwan Ribhu’s journey shows how one rescue operation can become the starting point for social change. What began with the rescue of missing girls led him to build a movement focused on using the law, demystifying it and enabling thousands of child-rights activists around the world to protect children from trafficking, exploitation and child marriage.
His work has helped lay the framework to bring child marriage down from 23 per cent in 2021 to less than 6 per cent by 2030, the tipping point.
Ribhu’s words, “silence is violence”, emphasise that protecting children begins with refusing to remain silent when they are at risk. He says, “If we fail to protect our children today, nothing else we do will matter tomorrow.”
Should preventing child exploitation become a shared responsibility for every community?
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