Disclaimer
This article discusses child safeguarding using a publicly reported ongoing case for context. The case remains subject to investigation and judicial proceedings, and nothing here should be read as a determination of fact or legal liability.
The pattern repeats. Tragedy. Investigation. Blame. Silence. Then the cycle resets, waiting for the next one.
Safety shouldn't be something we measure after the fact. It has to already exist, before anything happens.
As Founder of the National Council for School Safety, one question keeps coming back to me. Not "how did this happen." But "why did no one build the system that would have caught it before it did."
A nine-year-old in Jaipur is the reason this won't leave me this year.
What her family alleges happened to her, and what the school is accused of missing, is still before the courts. I won't treat contested facts as settled ones a judge hasn't ruled on yet.
But no verdict is needed to say this: a child that young should never have to figure out, alone, how to get an adult to listen.
She tried. Repeatedly, by her family's account. That tells you everything about what children are capable of.
A 2026 study of adolescents in Himachal Pradesh found that nearly one in five had been involved in physical or cyber-bullying, either as a target or an aggressor. Ask any teacher off the record, and that number will feel low.
For a child that age to know the right way to raise it, and to keep raising it, is remarkable. That it may still have gone unheard is what should sit uncomfortably with anyone running a school, a safety programme, or a standards body like ours.
So here's the question I keep sitting with: how many more of these before we accept that a child's safety inside a school isn't a side conversation?
Abuse. Mental health. Trauma. Peer pressure. Bullying. These aren't "incidents." They're exactly what a safeguarding system exists to catch.
Safeguarding, in plain terms, just means the policies and processes that protect a child from harm inside an institution. Treat these as one-off events instead of building that system, and they keep recurring.
If accounts like this family's are accurate, distress like this rarely starts the week before it becomes visible. It builds, sometimes over many months.
Without a mechanism built to catch that slow build-up, a child quietly asking for help is the easiest signal in the world to miss. Not because adults don't care. Because nothing was built to make sure they noticed.
Bullying turns dangerous exactly where there's no reliable way to detect it, report it, step in, and keep watching after. And this isn't a checklist exercise.
Every child is different. Every situation is different. Handling it needs sensitivity a form can't give you. That's the real difference between a system and a compliance sheet.
Most children already understand that speaking up is the first step. But it's also true that some confident, popular kids target and harass their peers on purpose, treating it as entertainment. A real system has to plan for both: the child trying to be heard, and the child who won't stop until someone steps in.
Grand infrastructure doesn't guarantee safety. Neither do smart classrooms or CCTV panels. That's a comforting myth built on materialism, not evidence.
Every time something happens, the real question isn't whether the checklist got followed. It's whether anyone was running a system built to step in before the checklist ever mattered.
So what does a real safeguarding system actually look like?
Not one policy sitting in a file somewhere. Four things, working together, all the time.
Policy: A clear, legally sound definition of what bullying is, how it gets reported, and what happens at each stage. Not implied. Written down, and known by every adult on campus.
Process: A way to report and escalate that a nine-year-old can actually use. One that doesn't depend on which teacher happens to be listening that day.
People: Adults trained to spot distress before it becomes a crisis, and held accountable when a report goes nowhere.
Practice: Documentation, monitoring, and drills, taken as seriously as a fire evacuation. Rehearsed before it's needed, not assembled after.
Ask these four questions about any school. Including the one you've probably read about this year.
Was there a written policy? Was there a process a child could actually use? Were the adults trained to notice? Was any of it practiced before it was needed?
If the answer to even one is no, the system didn't fail at the moment of tragedy. It failed on the day it was never built.
That's the actual work. Not another workshop. A system that exists before the cry is heard, not one assembled after it.
About the Author: Shikha Agnihotri is the Founder of the National Council for School Safety, working with schools across India to strengthen child safeguarding systems.
