If your abuser is not a family member, the disclosure within your family and his will be much easier. As will the confrontation, but you really need not bother with it. What will you get at the maximum from a confrontation? What can he do to set right what he has already so badly wronged? You will not be able to send him to jail; it is too late for that. You will get an acknowledgement of responsibility; you already know your abuser to be him. You will get an admission that what you say is true; you already know it to be true. You will get a change in the relationship; you have already instituted that change with your disclosure to yourself and the families. What you might get, which you have not got till now, is an apology; can you be certain that the man is apologizing from his heart, that he really feels sorry for what he did and that he understands what he did to be wrong?

There are not all that many international studies done on perpetrators; the few existing ones find themselves as up against a stone wall when it comes to the crunch: getting the man to feel sorry. Getting them to say sorry is no problem, it is a social demand for that moment and the abuser simply goes with the flow to get out of the sticky situation he finds himself in. Getting the abuser to really feel sorry—so that they do not do it again—does not quite work that way.

It does not even work when they come out of good therapy. There is a teacher, declared cured by one of the best psychiatrists in the city, who simply went back to buggering little boys in suburban Mumbaii schools; the man had also sworn on his religious beliefs as also his child’s head that he would never, ever, do it again. And there is this father, who sexually abused his daughter, who told counsellor Kalindi Muzumdar, ‘I did it because it was all right to do it, and it is all right to do it because Brahma did it. Brahma also fell in love with his daughter, he created Lakshmi and kept turning to look at her which is why he has three heads.’ It made no difference to the abuser that what he was citing was not history but mythology. ‘It is about the gods,’ he insisted. He was equally indifferent that he was looking at it incorrectly, he did not care that there is nothing in mythology to support his distorted view. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, even from adult situations?

What, in the final analysis, is a person who perpetrates Child Sexual Abuse?

He is a bastard.

What worth can a bastard’s apology have?

So why would you yearn for an apology from a bastard?

Instead, concentrate your energies on that person who is special and worth your attention: yourself; and your own healing.

Healing by Yourself

Perhaps you are one of those healing on your own, with no disclosure, no assistance, nothing at all and the minimum of fuss.