A five-year-old girl was tortured to death by her father and stepmother; a young man accused of deliberately letting his son drown in a flooded river; a five-year-old boy currently battling for life at a hospital after being brutally assaulted by his father and stepmother; an 11-year-old girl admitted to hospital with serious burn injuries inflicted by her own father…
A spurt in incidents of cruelty towards children by parents has generated a feeling that the safest place for kids, home, is fast turning into hell for them in Kerala, hailed as God’s Own Country in tourism brochures. Sociologists say such incidents are indicative of a horrific malady that is spreading through the society in the new age.
“If we were discussing at the start of this year how home had become hell for the girl child in Kerala due to a spurt in incidents of rapes of minors by their fathers and close relatives, we are now discussing how home is no more the safest haven for kids in general. Definitely something serious is happening to the average Keralite,” says writer-critic Shanavas.
The present phase of discussions on the malady opened with the hospitalisation earlier last week of five-year-old Shafeeq of Chenkara in Idukki district in an unconscious state with a swollen, fractured leg and marks of brutal torture all over his body inflicted by his father Sherif, an icecream vendor, and his second wife Alisha.
The duo had been torturing the boy for the past two years. About three weeks ago, they struck him with an iron rod fracturing his leg, thus making him immobile. In continuing acts of cruelty, the father kicked him one day, with which he fell unconscious after striking his head against a cot-post in the force of the kick. Shafeeq was taken to the hospital only after 12 hours.
That is not the only such incident reported in Kerala in the recent days. On Sunday, a man was arrested from Thenoor in Palakkad district for raping his minor daughter. A relative of his second wife was also arrested on the same charge. Police officials say that the actual number of such incidents could be much higher as many could be going unreported.
“I can’t imagine this is happening in Kerala where parents are eager to give their children everything they can right from the tender age,” Shanavas says.
“What is common in all these incidents is the poor economic background of the parents. But I don’t think economic hardships should drive you mad,” he says.
Social psychologist Aneesh Panicker blames globalisation for the recurrence of such incidents. “Economic hardships can indeed drive you mad especially in a society like Kerala where money has become the essence of life in this era of globalisation. Those who cannot make sufficient money may try to find a reason for that. Kids thus become easy targets,” he says.
Psychologists point out that most of the parents who torture their children brutally do not have any criminal background at all.
“It should be the burden of the social and economic situations that weighs on them which is forcing them to commit such brutalities. Indeed it is a very dangerous psychological condition,” says a Kochi-based psychiatrist.
Kerala has witnessed an increase by almost 300 percent in crimes against children in the past five years, according to the State Crime Records Bureau.
The number of such cases registered in 2003 was 549, but it became 1,324 in 2012. The State had seen 480 incidents of crimes against children in the first three months of the current year.