PROTECTING THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN: THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA LESSONS FROM BRAZIL, INDIA AND KENYA
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Suraj Jha,17, a blind student at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, attends drama therapy classes that encourage communication with peers. WIth support from UNICEF he is learning to write and produce radio stories for the university radio station, Radio Ju. © UNICEF / GRAHAM CROUCH
vernacular-language areas promptly pointed out that the popularity of social media has been on a constant rise in rural settings with many rural teenagers accessing social media, particularly Facebook, through mobile phones for sharing photographs, posts and displaying ‘likes’. While the lack of English knowledge amongst many rural youth is a significant barrier, Avanindra Mishra, head of the Hindi web portal Naya India, says, “It is an urban myth that rural youth do not have access to the Internet; with the growing popularity of mobile phones, many educated rural teenagers, particularly boys, are learning to use tools such as Google Translate and can now access and read articles that they feel are relevant or interesting.” With increasing mobility and social networking offered by operators, it’s expected that more young users will get onto social networks and the Internet.67
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Irshad Daftari, Senior Product Manager, NDTV. Personal Interview (7 September, 2013).
HOW WELL DOES INDIA’S MEDIA EMBRACE CHILD RIGHTS? Media guidelines and monitoring: A few media guidelines for child rights reporting already exist in India; some of these are court imposed, while others have been developed through a CSO-government partnership. However, the media sector appears to be largely ignorant of the existence of these guideline documents. Most reporters are informed of the stipulations on child coverage by editors when they file stories that violate set norms, rather than through training. While the common, court-imposed norms are largely followed by the big media houses, occasional slips occur; reporters in rural areas are less aware about these child coverage regulations. Regulatory/watchdog media bodies are present in India, both for print as well as television, but none of these has expressed an interest or has the capacity to effectively monitor child rights coverage. Training: In-house training by media houses is extremely rare. However, NGOs and other organisations have conducted training workshops