What can the media do vis-à-vis Child Sexual Abuse in India? The media cannot stop Child Sexual Abuse in Indian homes, only those adults who live in it can. The media can report on this most evil of social crimes, be a mirror to society, as also perform the additional role of information dissemination and subject-awareness. The print media already does this, as do magazines and television programmes for the not cerebrally challenged. But given the magnitude of the problem and its in-built secrecy in upper and middle-class homes, television needs to do much more to take awareness on Child Sexual Abuse right into living and bedrooms. There needs to be a sustained focus.

In Western countries, information dissemination on Child Sexual Abuse is woven into print comics and television cartoons (at one point, Superman was assisting a sexually assaulted child) and popular television serials for both children and adults (Santa Barbara dealt with the subject over several episodes by making it a story track). Youth channels could prove invaluable here, considering there are teenagers in thousands who have been sexually abused in childhood. And it would certainly help both, India and its teenagers, if these music channels could start treating their young audience like the aware human beings they are instead of androids refusing to grow out of an age of compulsive revelry. On an average, the veejays and channels behave like hysterically gay parrots who find themselves baffled during a break.

‘Sustained focus’ could mean in the non-preachy manner that the Doordarshan of yore—before the private channels came along to emulate at first, then rapidly discard for pure revenue—managed to also show serials which were both, infotainment and edutainment. Ironical, that in the guise of suspect TRP’s (television rating points) the private general channels have corrupted DD’s abilities too. Yet, all need not be considered forsaken even in an era when gaudily-bedecked saas-es and bahu-s are blessed by their TV channel heads (invariably male) to wage kitchen politics. For those with the courage of their convictions, television programmes aimed at youngsters, serials for adults could well have similar, and sustainable, tracks too. This is possible and with a great degree of sensitivity, notwithstanding what some producers feel on the subject of Child Sexual Abuse.

Like twenty-four-year-old Ekta Kapoor, daughter of actor Jeetendra. She gives an interview to the Indian Express to announce her going public with her television company as also producing a Hindi film to be directed by David Dhawan (he of conveyor belt number one fame). When—can?—Bollywood ever produce a film which enjoys the personhood of children, the way Mani Ratnam and his audience did in his Anjali or Santosh Sivan in Halo? The ‘mainstream’ Hindi film industry continues to treat children like an extension of their parents on the silver screen; either they are being kidnapped for ransom, held over boiling cauldrons of an evil-bubbling liquid, watching their father being shot dead or their mother being propositioned by the villain so that they grow to avenge the horror; or they are just being senseless brats.