Any message that can underscore the point that males need to stop fucking little girls and boys, along with their childhood, is welcome.

Dealing with Disclosure

Child Sexual Abuse is no longer about only that most unequal of power and gender structures—a big man and a little girl. It is also about a big man and a little man. And then several years later—the little man as a big man and another little man; the victim as perpetrator, and thus perpetuator; male handing it down to male.

In short, Child Sexual Abuse is not solely a ‘woman’s problem’. Women are expected to protect their children, and children are generally taught by their mothers to protect themselves from men. But what about the men themselves? Specially the men who are not, and will never be, perpetrators—and then the perpetuators—of Child Sexual Abuse? There has never been a greater urgency than now for these men to start playing their role in not allowing Child Sexual Abuse by those men, men they would much rather dismiss as perverts.

If these men do not act, they will be responsible for the birth of more broken boys in the future.

Parents, therefore, have jointly to watch out. Even then disclosure can be both, chilling and heart-breaking.

A three-year-old comes up to her mother who is dressing up to go out for dinner that evening with her husband and says, ‘Mommy, show me your titties.’

‘What?’

‘Show me your titties, mommy.’

‘Chee-chee, who taught you such dirty things?’

‘S’not dirty, dadaji says it.’

‘Dadaji says it? To whom?’

‘To me.’

‘And then what do you do?’

The little girl quickly pulls up her T-shirt with both her hands and dances around her mother’s bedroom. ‘My titties, my titties, my titties, yea, yea, yea!’

The mother calls her five-year-old son. ‘Does dadaji tell your sister to do this?’

‘Yes mommy.’

‘What else does he do?’

‘He does funny things to her panties, then he washes her panties.’

‘Does he do anything to you?’

‘No mommy.’

‘Are you sure?’

The daughter chips in, for her it’s a game, ‘He’s lying mommy, he’s lying. Dadaji tells him to show him his popat (parrot), then he holds it.’

This is a tableaux which recently unfolded for a young mother, like a thunderbolt from the blue right into her happily married life. Especially grim was the magnitude of the abuse, that it had gone on for so long and neither she nor her husband had an inkling of what was being done to their children by their grandfather.

Every international study being examined, every child psychiatrist spoken to, is of the firm opinion that prevention is better than cure. But having positive goals is not enough for a parent; intervention and then the effectiveness of this intervention is equally critical.

G. Caplan’s conceptual model of prevention in mental health, which he presented in 1964 as ‘Principles of Preventive Psychiatry’, has been widely employed the world over in relation with Child Sexual Abuse: