Child Abuse: Uncustomary Ways To Deal With It

Kakali Das

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the number of cases lodged in India on child pornography/rape and gang rape in between March and September this year was 13,244.

In a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha, Women and Child Development Minister, Smriti Irani said that the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) received 420 complaints of child sexual abuse from March 1 to August 31 via online portals, helplines and other media.

More than double this number goes unreported; in the lockdown it’s likely that the dynamics of families have changed. The children are exposed to various types to abuse – verbal abuse, violence, sexual abuse etc.

There are strong laws in our country but the problem isn’tmerely the laws but our understanding on the issues, the implementation of the laws and the possibilities of family having the ability – a) to keep the children safe and sound, b) to react when the situation arises that invariably catches the family by surprise.

19^th of November is the World’s Prevention of Child Abuse Day and 20^th of November is the International Children’s Day, but how ironic it is for the world to still be incapable of curbing child abuse!

In India, according to a government commission survey, dated 2007, more than 53% of the children in India are subjected to sexual abuse. 109 children were sexually abused each day in 2018 – NCRB. A lot of timepeople refrain from realising that more than half of those who experiencechild abuse in India are boys.

They focus a lot on keeping their daughters safe by keeping an eye on the girls and ensuring their safety, but they tend to be a little more nonchalant as far as the boys are concerned. They are allowed to storm off and be as exposed as they desire, but it’s important for parents to realise that boys are just as much, if not more, at risk than girls.

This entire concept where the boy is the protector and the girl is the one to be protected is the crux of the problem.

All children, irrespective of gender, are susceptible to child sexual abuse, and patriarchy in general acts as deterrent for boys to open up, since the boys perpetually have to wear the shield of being the defender, being someone who is forbidden from shedding tears, someone who can’t complain.

“Definitely, there is a huge shift from the time we started the NGO 14 years ago, talking about child sexual abuse was difficult. It was met with a lot of denial; there was a lot of myth around it. Now the reporters have been reporting continuously and the people have become more aware of the happenings of such abuse. There’s much more acceptance that I see today than earlier. Now when we go in to schools and do personal safety education programmes we no longer have to push it before parents and teachers. Parents themselves stand up and say how important it is for children nowadays to attend these programmes. We definitely see a huge shift that have happened in the last 10 years” – Pooja Taparia, Arpan NGO

“When I disclosed about my abuse 23 years back, the first reaction of my motherwas ‘If you were a girl, probably I would have taken care of you, I would have been a little more vigilant’. Though she is a big support to me today, that time she was apprehensive. She was sad that it happened to me but didn’t have the slightest assumption that it could happen to anyone who wasn’t a female”, Harish Iyer, Activist & Survivor

Moreover, this entire study is a binary study in itself, where we only speak about male and female children; there are intersexual children who get sexually abused as well.

The entire idea that there is one gender which is more susceptible to abuse and for the other genders the pain doesn’t matter at all is something that is problematic.

Traditionally in India, the idea of a girl’s or a woman’s body embodying the honour of the family and the entire concept of ‘maryada’ and ‘honour’ that gets tied into sexual abuse, somehow bypasses the boys altogether.

It almost doesn’t matter in terms of boys; they remain ill-bothered. I think, if men had hymen, virginity would have been a myth. People wouldn’t have talked about virginity at all if men were blessed with it.

The parents must realise that the lasting imprint of abuse on children as they grow up into adults leave scars that continue to appear and that needs to be dealt with. We have frequently witnessed parents who refrain from reporting the abuse on their children if it’s invariably a family member committing the crime or because they expect the child to get over it and forget with the passing of time.

Wish it were all plain sailing: shutting our eyes and expecting it to go away is ignorant and insensitive. In fact, as the child grows into adulthood, because of the conditioning, it is always perpetuated that one has to be strong and that such things don’t matter. Typically, they trivialise the horrors of those incidents and bury the memories somewhere, but it shows up in very insidious ways, things that we wouldn’t even think are related to sexual abuse.

For instance, accepting compliments, going out on dates, impact on their sexual lives – these are all obvious links. But there are signs that go unnoticed such as, overeating, concentration issues in adulthood, outburst of anger that arises out of the blue, and many others which don’t get linked easily.

There is no magic age to start a conversation on abuse of any kinds; one can start whenever one’s ready to unveil the dark episodes of one’s life. Parents feel hesitant regarding how to start and proceed with the talk.

There are various resources available; various NGOs like Protsahan India Foundation, Child Rights and You (CRY),Arpanwhich have built story books, work books that can aide and help parents and children have this conversation, including online courses that the parents can help the students take on. It’s very important to normalise this conversation with the children.

The challenge with this issue is that it has been under the carpet for too long; there has been such a taboo and silence around this topic that unless we normalise it, the silence won’t be broken.

At the age of two or three, we start teaching the names of the body parts to children such as, eyes, nose, ears, lips, chin, chest while skipping the entire genital area and moving straight to the legs.

One would find no such issue in it, but frankly speaking, children at that age start picking up the thought, ‘okay, I am probably not supposed to talk about those body parts as I haven’t been given any vocabulary for it’. Then we start building that conditioning of communication from that point.

At that age, mentioning the names of the private parts alongside the other parts of the body would normalise the situation, and won’t create doubts or inquisition in the minds of the children. Most children don’t report about sexual abuse because, a) they have inadequate vocabulary to talk about it, since they have always been made to believe that these parts are something we aren’t supposed to talk about, b) they fear that they would be blamed for it and that no one would believe them.

Pooja Taparia further said, “We have witnessed that thousands of parents we have done awareness with at Arpan, a lot of them have told us that one of the immediate changes that they have observed as an outcome of the Personal Safety Education Programme is that communication channels have opened up in between the children and parents.”

So I believe that if a child is in an unsafe situation, if the parents provide warmth, comfort and space to their children to come and open up aboutliterally anything, the child will run towards the bosom of their parents.

So, alongside the instructions on keeping the child away from fire, conversations on any kind of abuse, teaching them the importance of sharing anything abnormal with their trusted adult, reinstating them while getting an opportunity is utmost important.

All that needs to be done is help them understand the differences between safe and unsafe touches, how it’s never acceptable for others to look or touch their private parts, except to keep them clean and healthy, and assuring them that if anything ever goes wrong, it is never their fault. Giving these key messages go a long way.

[Images from different sources]

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