Quietly cross-questions Deepika D’Souza, director of the Mumbaii-based India Centre for Human Rights and Law which is working towards strengthening its child rights wing: ‘Why do so many men pee in public? Because as far as such men are concerned the road is there, to be pissed upon. Because they can. Because there is nobody to stop them. I would think they sexually abuse children for the same lack of concrete reason.’

Doctors can find themselves as despairing when questioned why adults set upon children sexually. Mulls Calcutta psychiatrist Dr Sujit Ghosh, who also works with the subject of male sexuality, ‘The myth of penetration and manliness is quite firmly grounded. The pressure of being a virile male stud is just as much. And penetration does seem the most reconfirming ritual to it. But I would not rule out lust.’

Dr Rajesh Parikh is the country’s first neuro-psychiatrist: he examines the neurological basis for psychiatric disorders and also the psychological manifestations of neurological disorders. In other words, he connects brain to behaviour to thought to feeling and consequent action. Dr Parikh is currently part of the core committee of the Asian Union Against Depression, a World Health Organisation affiliate, which is organizing intensive ways and means of collecting data from general practitioners from all over Asia on smiling depression. Smiling depression is that other word for masked depression where people have difficulties with sleep and appetite, they do not feel like meeting other people, they might have headaches often, they might feel weak all the time, their bodies might hurt, they frequently complain of getting tired very easily. Women in our country—not excluding the subcontinent—suffer a great deal from smiling depression. The data for this project will be collected through specially formulated questionnaires distributed to general practitioners all over Asia, including India, and will take a few years to compile. Severe depression is one of the most common long-term effects of adult females and males who have been sexually abused in childhood in the West; it could well take the form of smiling depression in Asia too as Eastern (including Indian) cultures do not have the vocabulary which encourages the verbalization of feelings.

At this Author’s request Dr Rajesh Parikh has agreed to put in appropriate questions and their co-relates in the Indian, and its neighbouring countries’, set of questionnaires asking whether the patient, male or female, had been sexually abused in childhood. In the unlikely event of any other organization conducting such an extensive survey, Dr Rajesh Parikh’s project would be the first of its kind as authenticated documentation on both, smiling depression and Child Sexual Abuse as one of its causes in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Pakistan.

Dr Rajesh Parikh says, ‘For reasons we do not completely know chemical reactions get triggered off in the brain by traumatic events, Child Sexual Abuse is particularly traumatic. The adult who has been sexually abused in childhood can also have a neuro-physiological change in the brain when recalling the trauma. These chemical reactions can give rise to depression, mania, post-traumatic stress disorders and a host of other effects which doctors working in the field of Child Sexual Abuse would need to probe for.’