Child sexual abuse may be much younger than rape which is the oldest crime in the world, but it has grown by leaps and bounds, become more violent than ever and is alarmingly commonplace. DEEBASHREE MOHANTY, MANJARI SINGH & SANGEETA YADAV give you a lowdown on how unorganised the response to this scourge is. This is the first part of a three-cover series on the issue
A 336 per cent jump in child sexual assaults in one decade, one in three children vulnerable to rape, 57 per cent boy victims, slums most vulnerable and Delhi leads the metros in rape figures with 339 already this year. A five-year-old picked up randomly and not just raped but also brutalised with vaginal insertions of a bottle and candles. Just nine days later, another six-year-old girl rushed to AIIMS after a brutal assault in a public toilet.
In between these two cases, Delhi reports 10 cases of rape — this when 85 per cent of child sexual assaults are not even brought to light! Ten years ago, an 11-year-old boy was found lying at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Stadium with his rectum hanging out; just the other day, a one-month-old baby was retrieved from a dump with deep vaginal tears!
Three decades earlier, in lucknow, a three-year-old girl was fished out of a bush in a deserted field with no part of her body without deep gashes, her genitals reduced to being one big blood-soaked hole. She is 33 years old now, without a marriage or ability to conceive. In Mumbai, meanwhile, a 12-year-old was raped and then made to shower inside out by the rapist who did not want to leave any trace that could lead to him.
What more is needed to confirm that perversion and depravity are no longer prisoners of rarity, or restricted to one area of IndiaIJ They have become as commonplace as the aam aadmi, more wanton, extremely violent, clever and an anywhere, anytime epidemic hurtling towards a complete social rupture of urban India.
Enough talk has happened around the ‘whys’ of child rape but, quite alarmingly, no one yet has any answers on how to curb this dangerous plummet into lunacy, neither the experts, nor the law enforcers, and definitely not the drawing room twitterati who are more concerned about why curbs are being proposed on porn viewing than on what really needs to be done to save our women and children from the world’s oldest crime — rape.
“There’s no specific answer to why anyone would rape a child. Twenty years ago, when people used to go shopping, they would come back home without the desperation to possess all things unaffordable. Now, it’s different. People want everything and will do anything to get them there and then. For example, when they see Priyanka Chopra in a short skirt smoking, drinking and ending up in bed with a total stranger in a film, they think of easy availability. They can’t get Priyanka, so they victimise whoever is available, of whatever age,” Nishit Kumar, head, communication & strategic initiatives, Childline India Foundation, Mumbai, opines.
But isn’t that a one-off caseIJ Not in posh areas, but more so in slums, many activists say, insisting that these unplanned, cramped settlements are most vulnerable to crime of all sorts — be it alcoholism in men, wife-beating, promiscuity, thefts, robberies, murders or rape.
One look at the stained, dingy and dilapidated building in Gandhi Nagar where Gudiya was attacked and left to die by two migrant youths from Bihar tells you why slums are the most vulnerable places to crime in Delhi’s concrete jungle.
This three-storeyed building with 30 rooms in all, a basement and one washroom on each floor to be shared by 10 families each, resembles a dungeon you might see on those porn sites that the elite are so vehemently against being denied public access. The room where Gudiya used to live with her parents and a three-year-old brother is locked and neighbours refuse to talk of the incident.
The first floor and the basement are reserved for single working men while the second and third floors are where families live, five to seven persons stacked in one room. The room rent ranges from Rs1,700 to Rs2,000, depending on its size.
“We don’t know what really happened and we don’t want to talk about it. You know how Delhi is. We are poor people who are here in this big bad city just to earn our living. My husband is a labourer and I stay at home to take care of my child and watch TV,” says one of the residents who came here from Farrukhabad in UP two years ago.
No one from this building has come out to protest against what happened to Gudiya. The landlord lives on the top floor. Tenants say he doesn’t interact with anyone and knocks doors only once a month to collect the rent.
Kiran Martin, who has worked with one belt of slums in Delhi for close to three decades, explains the reasons for this abject state of indifference. “Almost 80 per cent of women living in such areas have to go out for work with most of their husbands either out on work too or living in a haze of alcohol. Only 8-10 per cent take their minor children to work. The rest are left to fend for themselves with no aanganwadi scheme worth its while in place. About 25 per cent of older siblings have been forced to leave school to take care of the younger ones,” she tells you.
Martin’s NGO Asha has surveyed amenities in such areas long enough to conclude that there are local creches where the children can be sent for a nominal fee but they, too, aren’t completely safe. “Mothers feel it is better to leave their child unattended at home rather than leave them somewhere else,” Martin says.
She also lists the skewed sex ratio as another reason for girls being abused. “For every 10 boys in the western slums of Delhi, there are only about five girls. Boys are given preference for education and medical facilities over the girl child. This false sense of importance raises a male generation which thinks it can get away with anything. He has no care for social mores. Then, there is lack of moral education because the mother is not educated and the child too learns not to respect women, seeing his father abusing his mother with no redress,” she adds.
Another problem is that parents of children from the lower strata have a skewed knowledge and response to child abuse. “Parents from upper or middle class still have some clue about reporting and dealing with sexual abuse but when it comes to slum parents, once their child is victimised, they don’t know what to do next,” says Pooja Taparia, founder of Mumbai-based NGO Arpan.
“They often don’t go to the police for fear of stigma and then the police, too, are not friendly. The FIR which is the first and foremost thing becomes the most difficult thing for them to lodge,” Ranjana Gaur, Varanasi-based NGO Social Action and Research Centre, says.
Recalling an incident, Ranjana says: “There was this 10-year-old daughter of a rickshaw puller who was gangraped. The police, as usual, refused to lodge an FIR and then her medical report didn’t claim any traces of forced sexual intercourse. The incident took the city by a storm and after a lot of trouble we ‘convinced’ the administration that she was really raped,” she tells you.
Even if parents don’t want to go for legal action, counselling and medical treatment should be their next stop. But in most cases, even that seems impossible. Take Gudiya’s case. Her parents are keen to return to their village even though their daughter needs a long haul of treatment to get reconstructed.
“Re-constructional surgery after rape is crucial and it takes a lot of time. Younger the child, more difficult it is for her to recover from injuries. The risk level is high. If injuries are limited to the vagina, the recovery can be done within a month. But if injuries are deep and there is a damage to the rectum and colon, chances become bleak and recovery after re-constructional surgery takes years,” Dr Suneeta Mittal, director and HOD of obstetrics and gynaecology, Fortis Memorial Hospital, Gurgaon, says.
The risks involved in re-constructional surgeries like vaginoplasty, labiaplasty, vaginal reconstruction or the urinary incontinence surgery, are there. “One is spread of infection and sexually transmitted diseases; second, continuous bleeding and, third, conceiving problems later in life. After the surgery, they need to be under doctor’s care, especially during menstruation,” Dr Mittal tells you.
Then there are injuries that can heal only with proper counselling. “Parents think children forget but that is not the case. Slum parents don’t even know what counselling is,” Gaur says. Seldom do slum parents of abused children agree to or come for counselling sessions. “It becomes very difficult for our counsellors to go to them all the time. So, there’s no counselling,” Tapria adds. Among the abusers, there are many who have been victims of abuse themselves. “What kind of adults they become depends on the severity of their abuse. Each case is different.
There are some children who are sexually traumatised and then there are some who are abusers. Fifty per cent of abusers have themselves been sexually abused at some point in life,” she says.
Also, the view that all child abusers are ‘mentally ill’ isn’t entirely true. “They are normal people, (like Manoj whose employer insists he was like any other normal worker who didn’t betray at any given point that he could be a dastardly abuser),” says Gaur.
There’s no specific answer to why anybody would abuse children as young as a one-month-old. “There are offenders who are habitual and unable to have sexual relationship with adults, so they abuse hapless children. And then there are some who are unable to cope with trauma and have poor impulse control,” says Tapria. “All of them know very well that they will be caught,” Gaur adds.
Many blame the availability of sexual props, like porn clips on mobiles, to changing sexual mores and the advent of violent kink. When Manoj, the man who raped Gudiya along with his friend Pradeep, was finally nabbed from his in-laws’ house in Bihar, he was making out with his wife, apparently with a porn clip running on his mobile phone. He also confessed to the cops that he got titillated by mobile porn and picked up Gudiya to satiate himself.
While, in a changing world hinged on the Internet and free domains of pornography, it would be unreasonable to seek a complete ban on sex viewing, there aren’t too many people who disagree with the fact that Internet porn has changed sexual behaviour to a large extent and “not really in the right direction.”
“India has the highest number of sexually active adults and sex has got space everywhere — from the billboard to the living room, to the mobile phone. Instant pleasure has become a desperation and potential rapists go for what is easily available,” Kumar opines. He, however, is quick to add that pornography is not the main culprit. “Our ability to deal with it is. look at the socio-economic changes in India between 1990 and now. It has shifted from being a predominantly agricultural economy to a services one. The bottom end of the job market in the services economy is for unskilled labourers/workers and this requirement is met by largescale migration from rural to urban India. In recent decades, India’s urban spaces have grown exponentially without any significant governance, policing, utilities, space management, lighting or community centres for children,” he adds.
But porn may be just one of the many factors, the prime among them being the breaking down of the distinct value culture that India and its population had so far grown up in. “The elasticity limit of our core moral values has drastically increased — what was considered wrong some decades ago, is okay today,” says a social scientist. He insists that all talk of “this, that and other action” holds no meaning if the inside is corrupt as a population. Till the time, the right and wrong of life is made distinct again, such depravities will continue to be commonplace — in any section of society, be it posh areas or slums, he says.
That yes, but the need for better amenities in slums can’t be discarded, Martin argues. “More than 70 per cent of slum houses are kuchha tenements with no designated rooms for parents and children. So, children often watch their parents having sex which is aggressive and sometimes brutal for the wife. They really don’t need to watch porn to get kinky when they grow up. It’s all there in the open for them. Also, children living in slums don’t see any harm in the use of force to have sex because they’ve seen it happen in their families,” Martin points out. Add to that an insensitive, untrained, overworked, underpaid police force, a judiciary that is snail snow, laws that are still too new to be comprehended and used and the stigma attached to rape, and the cocktail of this crime and impunity of offenders will give you the shudders.
First, let’s talk about law. It’s not as if India does not have appropriate provisions in place for child abusers. “The Prevention of Sexual Offences Against Children’s Bill, 2011, delineates the kinds of sexual abuse and the prescribed response to each. It clearly distinguishes between sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, penetrative sexual assault, aggravated penetrative sexual assault and sexual harassment. In each case, the kinds of actions that fall under this section are specified, and minimum and maximum punishments given,” Havoi Wadia, a child activist from Mumbai, tells you.
The newly formed Protection Of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POSCO) which is in force since 2012, is a very strong framework to work well but only if it is implemented well, Shantha Sinha, Chairperson of National Commission Protection of Child Rights, a newly constructed body to monitor POSCO, says. “This law is very child-friendly. We make sure police records the statement in an environment where the child is comfortable and not in the police station. Also, we make sure that the child never faces the accused even once during the trial,” she says. But is this Act being implementedIJ Activists say, it is too new and even the law enforcers are yet to figure it out. No wonder then that the cops had to be actually told by activists to book Manoj and Pradeep under this Act!
So what does one do to save the situationIJ Taking to the streets, isn’t helping as one is seeing. Actually, the need of the hour is to do whatever it takes — as NGOs suggest, a multi-pronged attack on this virus is what’s needed and if that includes perceived dictatorial measures like curbing porn viewing and restricting the artistic licence to portray nudity in films and on TV, so be it. Other than these peripheral measures, quick and proper implementation of law, reform of the police force, focus on slum management, counselling centres, a fast track justice system and reporting of the crime by parents, Martin says, will go a long way in protecting our young generation.
But, law cannot eradicate crime. It cannot stop offenders from committing rape, it can only punish them for it. So, the argument that change needs to come from within makes sense amid all this directionless hue and cry around repeated rapes in the Capital. Till then, our children will continue to live in darkness without dawn.
‘Normally’ depraved
Manoj Shah does not fit into the conventional profile of a pervert, but then, worldwide, child abusers are known to come across as very normal people doing normal jobs, living normal lives — till they are caught in the act.
After committing the rape, and leaving the bleeding girl to die in a dingy basement, Manoj caught the next train back to Bihar, went to his in-laws’ house with a box of sweets and some mutton, attended a local fair with them and made love to his wife with a porn clip running on his mobile in the background. That’s when the cops caught him.
In short, it was business as usual for this serial offender who is known to have raped a village girl who is now married to him under panchayat instructions. His role in the rape and murder of his sister-in-law is also being probed.
Not that he ever betrayed the neighbours or his employer about his depravity. “Manoj worked for me and was good at his work. I didn’t see any signs of abnormality in him. In the two months that he worked here, I never saw him fighting with anybody or misbehaving. My stores are closed every Monday. We never saw him with Pradeep with whom he consumed alcohol and committed this horrendous act,” Pramod, owner of Abhishek Fab, the store where Manoj worked at a monthly salary of Rs8,000, tells you. Manoj’s neighbours say, he was a man of few words and generally kept to himself but whenever he interacted with anyone, he came across as a polite individual.
Much like serial killers who are known to be very particular about keeping up with “normality”, Manoj too kept up the façade of being just another migrant worker from Bihar till he picked up Gudiya and brutalised her without any remorse.