Bitter Chocolate

PINKI VIRANI

Bitter Chocolate

Child Sexual Abuse in India

Contents

About the Author

Author’s Note

Notebook One

Vaishali: Three Months

What is Child Sexual Abuse?

Home as Hell

What the Numbers Reveal

Child Rape

A Mother on the Run

Arun: Ten Years

Boy Versus Girl Victims

Historical Ethics of Child Abuse

Unofficial Secrets

Women as Perpetrators

The Aftermath

Srilakshmi: Eleven Years

Brother Nature

Prema: Seven Years

Child Prostitution

Notebook Two

Daughters & Mothers

Mothers & Men

Notebook Three

Tanuja: Nine Years

What the Law Ignores

Secondary Victimization

Prevention than Cure

Dealing with Disclosure

Child Protection Units

Dimple: Five Years

Dimple’s Brother

Exit Cycle

To the Victim

Healing by Yourself

Siddharth: Twelve Years

Razia: Thirteen Years

Helpbooks

Helplines

Afterword

Acknowledgement

Follow Penguin

Copyright

PENGUIN BOOKS

BITTER CHOCOLATE

Pinki Virani, with four best-selling books, has a body of work which gives voice to individuals who have none. It also leads to landmark legislation, not just once but twice. Her tireless campaigning for human dignity has lead to laws for two of the most vulnerable times in a human being’s life—in the beginning as a child and at the end as a terminally ill patient.

Her sustained crusading since 2000 has assisted in India passing a law against sexual abuse of children, The Protection of Children against Sexual Offences Act 2012. The law includes four of her suggestions to the Parliamentary Standing Committee. This book, Bitter Chocolate, has been quoted by the Madras High Court. Since the book’s release, there have been attempts by some courts across the country to follow a few practises recommended in Bitter Chocolate to protect the child, during trial, from his or her perpetrator and from excessive re-traumatisation.

In 2011, the Supreme Court of India passed a historic judgment permitting Passive Euthanasia in the country. This followed Pinki Virani’s plea to the highest court in 2009. It’s a landmark law which places the power of choice in the hands of the individual, over government, medical or religious control which sees all suffering as ‘destiny’.

Aruna’s Story (first published by Penguin in 1998) is the book with which the author catalysed the law on Passive Euthanasia. It continues to be read by a cross-section of society: the medical community worldwide, right to die with dignity believers, human rights activists and gender-study students. As a first in Indian publishing in the non-fiction genre, it set a trend for journalists to follow in writing books. A leading critic described it as ‘India’s answer to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood’. A noted financial newspaper said the path-breaking book—which introduced the faction style (facts presented in fiction format with underpinnings firmly in non-fiction) in the sub-continent—had ‘changed the face of Indian writing for all time’.

Once Was Bombay (1999) is reference material for sociology specialists and was cited by then Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in his speech on collapsing cities. Once Was Bombay, referred to as a ‘cult book’ on social networking sites, is one of the first books in English publishing to present the city in a non-romanticized, frills-shorn narrative in the faction genre. The template of Once Was Bombay—the vicious pillage of a city’s cosmopolitanism by provincial politicians in the name of language, then religion—has proved particularly prescient.