The victim and her friends, three of them, would go to the fourth friend’s house as children at Mumbaii’s Marine Drive. This was when they were all around ten years old. The grandfather of the house sexually abused every one of them, except his own granddaughter. This happened regularly. It took fifteen years for one of the victims to disclose this to an adult although all the victims spoke of it, in hushed tones, among themselves as little girls.

After a lot of preparatory work with Kalindi Muzumdar, the twenty-five-year-old told her parents about her Child Sexual Abuse. Her parents were supportive.

‘What can we do now to help you? We very much want to help you,’ they said.

The girl spoke to her friend whose grandfather had abused her. Her friend chose not to believe her.

‘Ask our other friends whether he did it to them or not,’ said the girl to her friend.

Slowly, the friend did. The other girls said yes, it is true, but we don’t want to have anything to do with it now that we are older and leading our own lives.

The friend spoke to her family, they would not believe her. But she stood convinced.

A family meeting was called and the girl was invited, her family was prepared to go with her but she preferred to do it alone. She walked into the home where she had been sexually abused as a child and stood in front of the grandfather as he sat there, surrounded by his family.

‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I am deeply sorry for what I did to all of you little girls.’

The girl is healed today. As is the woman who went and spat on her father’s grave because he had sexually abused her when she was young. Both these women bear scars, of course, but a scar is the best indication that a wound is no longer open and bleeding, it has closed because of the healing.

Such confrontations with perpetrators don’t always go off so well, in fact they do not go well at all. The abuser has done what he wanted to, a long time ago; he is not likely to confirm it should you confront him now. Certainly you can—specially if you feel other children can get hurt by him—tell your family and his. This would be disclosure. Do not confuse disclosure with confrontation; you might even find that disclosure is more than enough.

Making a disclosure in the family, if a family member has sexually abused you as a child, is very tough. Please make the decision to disclose to an entire family, or one member of it, only after you are very sure that you are strong enough to do so. Remember to expect nothing from it, the family might well go on treating your abuser like before. You will need to feel very stable, very centred, very cool and collected when you are doing this disclosing because you might not be believed. Or there might be no reaction at all, it might be as if you said nothing at all of any consequence. On the other hand, there might be a situation where several parts of the family may simply stop talking to you, they might start excluding you from family gatherings. Are you strong enough; are you working on making yourself strong enough that what you disclose is by far the most important thing than any negative reaction?