Sex, lies and children

Sex, lies and children
India’s best kept dirty secret is out. More children are sexually abused in our country than anywhere else in the world.
Nishi Malhotra, Chandigarh

It was back in the early 1980s that actress Parveen Babi made a statement about most Indian girls not being virgins. What she meant was that they are sexually abused within the intimacy of their own joint family systems well before they begin dating or get married. I was studying in Delhi University at that time and remember the debates it sparked off in college hostels. One late evening, 12 girls gathered in a dorm room to argue over what Babi, who was no authority on the subject, had so casually said, and wondered if it could possibly be true. Finally, a secret vote on paper chits was taken – everyone present had to write yes or no in answer to the simple question, “Were you sexually molested as a child, or did anyone ever attempt to molest you?” Not a scientific survey and not a significant sample considering the mostly upper and middle class background of the girls present – but nine out of 12 chits came back with a ‘yes’ scrawled across them.

India’s best kept dirty secret now has an official stamp on it. A new government report, Study on Child Abuse: India 2007, published by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, says, “India has the world’s largest number of sexually abused children, with a child below 16 years raped every 155th minute, a child below ten every 13th hour, and one in every ten children sexually abused at any point in time.”
Conducted across 13 states (Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Delhi and Bihar are the worst offenders), the Study on Child Abuse reveals that a shocking 53.22 per cent of all Indian children are sexually abused and 70 per cent keep silent about what happens to them, neither reporting the abuse to parents or the police. The actual number has to be higher than the 53 per cent reported by this study because its sample group only comprised children aged 5 to 18 - daily newspapers, as everyone knows, routinely report incidents of children as young as two to five also being raped and/or abused in the country.

For those who think only Indian girls are unsafe, here’s another shocker: Boys, says the study, are more at risk for sexual abuse than girls. Out of the 12,447 child respondents who reported having faced one or more forms of sexual abuse that included severe and other forms, 52.94 per cent were boys and 47.06 per cent were girls.

Along with the revelations of this study in recent days have come the contrarian voices of adult policy-makers in several Indian states who want to ban the introduction of sex education in the middle school syllabus by the CBSE Board in the current school year. Their argument is that sex education is not in keeping with the Indian ethos and will corrupt the minds of impressionable children.

However, the only key to controlling the prevalence of and eventually getting rid of child sexual abuse is empowering children with knowledge about their own bodies and what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behaviour and contact with the adults and caregivers they interact with.