As you read this, you may already have forgotten about a child barely ten years old who was fighting for her life in the ICU of a hospital in Greater Noida just two weeks ago. She is no longer in the news. But this is not her first battle.

She was fighting for her life when her “employers”, a CRPF official and his wife, tortured her, abused her, clipped off her fingernails, and barely gave her food for months. When she was admitted to the hospital, her haemoglobin had fallen to a dangerously low level. Her frail body, struggling to breathe, was covered with scars and wounds, a testimony to the life she had endured.

Her battle, however, did not begin in the ICU.

Last year, her father abandoned her, her siblings, and their mother, leaving them to fend for themselves. With a mother living with mental disability, the child became the family’s sole caregiver and breadwinner. A couple of weeks ago, she was on the front pages of newspapers and on many of our minds. Then other fresher, more shocking news events took over.

So was another child, no more than fifteen, who walked over 150 kilometres with a severed hand to escape his employer. The boy, from Bihar, had been forced into labour on a farm in Haryana’s Jind district. His employer beat him, the family abused him, starved him, and when one day his arm was severed after getting stuck in a fodder machine he operated daily, the employer chose to throw him out.

A teacher found the child and took him first to a police station and then to a hospital. As the news broke, media houses thronged the hospital, interviewing the child. The public was outraged by the cruelty inflicted on him.

Then, inevitably, something else happened.

Another episodic tragedy took over the front pages. Another story shattered hearts. And just like every time before, the country moved on.

Last we heard, the girl remained in the ICU, under the care of authorities. Her mother cannot visit her or take responsibility for her due to her mental health condition. The boy, more fortunate in this regard, has been taken under the care of a partner of Just Rights for Children, a prominent network of NGOs working for child protection and child rights. His chances of rehabilitation are higher. The chances of the public remembering him remain dismally low.

At least these children made it to the headlines. Their perpetrators are either in custody or being tracked down. But the number of children who never make it to any page or primetime debate runs into lakhs.

These are not isolated horrors. They are statistics. And statistics, when ignored, become silence.

According to Census 2011, over ten million children between the ages of five and fourteen were engaged in child labour in India. As per the National Family Health Survey V (2019–21), almost one in every five girls is married before she turns eighteen. Every child marriage is child rape, and these children are no different from the ones we have been speaking about. Just today, The Times of India reported that over two lakh SOS calls were made to child helplines between September 2023 and December 2025.

These numbers should shatter us to the core. We should be angry that so many children remained unheard until they dialled for help. How much courage must a child muster before calling a helpline against their own employer, uncle, brother, neighbour, or stranger?

Meanwhile, society forgets.

It did not remember the children working in dhabas, restaurants, and private homes in 2011. A decade later, it forgot a fourteen-year-old who was married twice and impregnated twice.

For these crimes to end, society must remember.

Remember the numbers. Notice the young children at traffic lights, in roadside eateries serving tea, and the ones sitting quietly by the road with bruises we notice and then forget. And we must get angry at what we see. Not the fleeting anger that dissolves into weekend plans, but the kind that compels us to act, to question, and to report.

Our outrage trends. Their trauma does not.

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