These police officers would run the Child Protection Unit round the clock and would be sensitized to Child Sexual Abuse as also a child’s physical and emotional abuse, as separate and combined issues since a child’s sexual abuse also has its echoes in physical and emotional abuse. The sensitization programmes can be done by the organizations working in the legal, police, medical and counselling areas of Child Sexual Abuse. Such sensitization programmes can also include the medical examiners and that very important, but largely forgotten figure, the public prosecutor. One sensitization session would definitely include the difference between abuse of a child by a stranger and its family member; the latter coming with a different set of dynamics and requiring more skills in case investigation.

Each city’s Child Protection Unit would have a bank of child counsellors attached to it, drawn from the organizations working with Child Sexual Abuse in the city. Counsellors must necessarily come with a working knowledge of Child Sexual Abuse trauma; children who are brought with physical wounds—and not necessarily a torn vagina or anus—may have been sexually abused with a finger or intense fondling. They are not likely to reveal this outright. But a trained counsellor can coax out disclosure with even a doll or puppet-play situated in a non-threatening room. She can comfort the child and bring out the puppets to tell open-ended stories. The child will finish the story by talking about its sexual abuse, almost always in the third person.

The only disadvantage of this would be the hurry associated with the disclosure. Mumbaii child counsellor Veena Fernandes recalls the time a ‘did he, did he not sexually abuse his granddaughter’ opinion was required within a fortnight. ‘I made good progress and I did not push the child, allowing her to find her own ways of trusting me,’ she says. ‘But there was this deadline so during the third session I pushed a little, and it all came undone when the child simply withdrew. I had to start all over again.’ The child did disclose, that dadaji had given her a Barbie doll and chocolates, that he took her for bath and touched her here and told her to touch him there. Veena Fernandes ascertained where ‘there’ was with the help of an anatomically-correct doll and wrote out her report. She also went to court to speak with the judge who refused to believe her, the judge would not even make eye contact with her; maybe he would have—the eye contact followed by the belief—if she had come from ‘within’, from a Child Protection Unit, for example, as the child’s case manager.

These case managers, as the counsellors can be designated, in a Child Protection Unit can get called in on a rotational basis as soon as a child abuse is reported, be it sexual, physical or emotional. The same case manager would ‘stay’ with the case till its closure all the way, till the court declares its judgement, and this would also help the child have on-line counselling and comfort during its visits to the courtroom for cross-examination. At the CPU, the child’s case manager would get the child to disclose, and would help the police officer in the video taping of a child’s testimony. The video taping section would be like that of the counselling section, chosen from the city and attached to the Child Protection Unit on a freelance basis and paid accordingly; thus cutting out the need to specially hire and train and then maintain sections by the police force itself.