Within a few days of banning 857 porn websites and having been accused of invasive moral policing, the BJP government reversed the order equally impulsively, making an exception only for those websites engaged in child pornography. Meanwhile in Bangalore, a 25-year-old security guard of a posh, Indira Nagar school was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a three-year-old girl, on the school campus, earlier this week. While the culprit was arrested, child rights activists are demanding faster trials and better safety checks in yet another Indian city that has seen an upsurge in the levels and intensity of child sexual abuse. In October 2014, a four-year-old child in the nursery section of Orchid International School, was allegedly sexually assaulted by unidentified persons.
In July 2015, the police arrested two gym instructors at the Vibgyor International School for sexually assaulting a five-year-old child. In August 2015, a 63-year-old teacher of a school in South Bangalore, was arrested for attacking a nine-year-old child. Of the 289 POCSO cases lodged in 2014, less than 25 trials have actually been closed and there have been convictions in less than 10 per cent of the cases. Also, trials in cases of minors raped by school staff in July-October last year are still left to conclude.The Karnataka Child Rights Commission, which has taken up a similar case, claims that it’s trying to pressurise the government to speed up trials. ‘POCSO cases should conclude in a year’s time and that has not been happening. We need more fast-track courts, exclusive POCSO courts even…we need to put pressure on departments,’ DrKripa Amar Alva, Chairperson, Karnataka Child Rights Commission was recently quoted in a leading daily.
According to a 2007 study by the Indian Government, of the nearly 12,500 children from across India, 53 per cent face some form of child sexual abuse-so what does BachpanBachao even mean? A statement released by Louis-Georges Arsenault, UNICEF representative to India states, “It is alarming that too many of these cases are children. One in three rape victims is a child. More than 7,200 children including infants are raped every year; experts believe that many more cases go unreported. Given the stigma attached to rapes, especially when it comes to children, this is most likely only the tip of the iceberg.”
While addressing child sexual abuse, let’s not forget that sexual offences against children are committed in situations as diverse as marriage and child sex trafficking. The Naths of Bihar, for example, treat prostitution as a way of life. When a family doesn’t have a daughter, girls are purchased from other parts of the state and pushed into sex work so that the family can subsist off their earnings.
According to CRY, 8,945 children go missing in India every year. Nearly 500,000 children are estimated to be forced into the sex trade every year, with approximately 2 million child commercial sex workers aged between 5 and 15 years. Children form 40 per cent of the total population of commercial sex workers. 80 per cent of these children are found in five metros-Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore. 71 per cent of them are illiterate. The employment of children as child labour – working as domestic labour, or helpers in restaurants, tyre shops and tea stalls, are equally susceptible to sexual violence at the hands of employers and customers.
Bollywood actress Kalki Koechlin too opened up to the world, when she said that she had been sexually abused as a child. Top Indian designer Raakesh Agarvwal had also shared gory details of his life in an earlier interview, ‘I didn’t know how to respond to a gross offender, how to react to a sexual predator, how to distinguish a man who was being affectionate from someone who was being downright offensive.When I was three or four, I was groped and manhandled by a close relative. My mother seemed to be completely unaware that the man she would occasionally ask to bathe me would regularly hurt me and force me to take his member in my mouth. And what does a child even know about all this stuff? We were a large joint family. Sometimes a relative or someone’s son, who stayed with us, would force me into doing things. Nasty things. Our factory manager, Pasha, too, would take his chances. Violations never stopped. Only a child, I could neither process nor understand the pain, the hurt, the fear…’
What perpetuates this vicious cycle of abuse and exploitation is the shameful silence associated with a child often being exploited by members of his/her own family, very often even the parent. The 2007 survey had disclosed that more than 50 per cent of survey participants were sexually abused in ways that ranged from severe – like rape or fondling – to milder forms of molestation that included forcible kissing. In 50 per cent of child abuse cases, the abusers were familiar with the child or were in a position of trust and responsibility and most children did not report the matter to anyone.
Another glaring aspect of child sex abuse is that the incidence is at least 10 per cent higher among boys than girls. The cases are not reported, according to activists. While it is commonly assumed that a girl child is unsafe, some parents hush up matters when their son complains about sexual abuse, because they think of the consequence-a girl child could become pregnant, but not a boy.
The same survey revealed that the percentage of male victims stood at 57.3 and 42.7 per cent being girls – a broad margin of almost 15 per cent. Raakesh added in the same interview, ‘There was no concept of sex education in school. My relative, who remained for long, one of my biggest sexual assaulters, would continue to prey on me. I was petrified of returning home. Sometimes, he’d smuggle in his friends and they would beat me so much, I’d become unconscious, after which they would take turns to rape me. Everywhere I went this man would follow me. Once at a family funeral, when I had to wear my father’s dhoti, I recall how he groped me.’
In a country that is culturally squeamish about sex, where parents are hardly ever intimate before their young ones, where sex education in schools is not mandatory and hence a myth and where the difference between good and bad touch is not explained to children – what are we doing by banning a few harmful porn sites? Is it enough to curb this mess? What about the predators lurking in dark, personal spaces? What about our sense of stigmatization that makes us cover up on behalf of our children? How about upscaling the medical and legal systems, which are thoroughly ill-equipped with no proper reporting mechanism? Parents focusing on the child instead of registering a police complaint – when will we start an open dialogue? When will this country wake up?
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