This book follows the sixteen years of age and below stipulation in addressing Child Sexual Abuse. (To be noted: teenagers are considered legally ‘juvenile’ till the age of eighteen; crimes by them are dealt with by the juvenile board.) Accordingly, cases which have come to light of other girls, and the few boys, in their late teens—seventeen, eighteen and nineteen—being sexually abused by the male members of their families have not been included. However, this does not intend to invalidate what those teenagers go through specially since age is no guarantee against emotional wounding; least of all a calendar which moves from sixteen to seventeen with more rapidity than a human being’s maturity.

What would be the immediate signs that the child is being sexually abused? There will be sudden physical and behavioural changes in the child, some of which could be the following. Please remember that the signs may not necessarily show up as a cluster:

• bed-wetting (this is not to be confused with sleep disorder bed-wetting)
• continuous loose motions or passing stools in bed
• hysterical reactions
• temper tantrums, aggressive behaviour
• depression, anxiety, withdrawal
• deep sense of isolation
• avoiding certain adults
• not concentrating at school or failing in exams
• attempting to physically hurt itself
• constant rubbing of body part against objects
• use of sexual words
• the child becoming focussed on its own genitals
• sexual exploration and abuse of other children
• constant throat and urinary infections
• irritation in the throat, anal and genital area
• recurrent abdominal pain
• sexually transmitted diseases
• running away from home
• masturbation
• substance abuse
• inability to eat certain foods that resemble the male organ or semen
• precocious sexual behaviour
• promiscuity, prostitution-like behaviour
• genital, urethral or anal trauma
• pregnancy
• committing suicide (This is being added after two cases last year, in 1999: in September an eleven-year-old middle-class Mumbaii girl killed herself after being sexually molested by her father; and in July a thirteen-year-old girl was raped by her stepfather in Lucknow, her mother got him arrested immediately but the girl committed suicide in September.)

Or there might be none of the above signs.

Instead, the child might very suddenly get hysterical. At least from the point of view of the parents who clearly are not in touch with their child’s internal tuning it would appear to be hysterical. For the child, this outburst would represent an eruption of what it has been trying to quell since a while. As a family in Delhi discovered. Their child suddenly begins to get frightened of the family dog. She insists the family dog is going to eat her up. It takes a long time for the parents to realize that their daughter is being sexually abused by her mother’s brother whenever he visits, under their very nose since the last few years.