Because in the Mumbaii suburb of Malad, a physical training teacher of a municipal-run school has sexually molested several girls. The thirty-five-year-old instructor denies it in spite of a few of the girls complaining to their parents after one girl was hounded out of the school by him when she refused to oblige and take off her clothes on the school’s terrace. The teacher denies it because he knows that the time the legal system takes will ensure he is exonerated. The girls by then will have finished school, be married, perhaps have had children, why would they want to come to court as victims?

Because a nine-year-old child artiste from the Tamil and Telugu film industry has been severely injured in her vagina by her fifty-year-old neighbour, a well-employed family man in Hyderabad. Her mother, a small-time actress, has died of the shock. The child, along with her twenty-year-old physically impaired sister who can only drag her body around, is now in Hyderabad’s only shelter for girls, Ankuram. They are from two different fathers, neither wants them; their maternal relatives say they cannot help either. Their mother’s boyfriend, a junior artiste in the film industry, moved into their house with his friends and liquor bottles and began contracting work in the films for the nine-year-old. Then they were shifted to Ankuram by the Juvenile Rights Forum and Childline.

Because Childline is registering far too many phone calls from children in sexual and physical agony. Childline—brainchild of a Mumbaii wonder-woman who shuns the spotlight, thirty-four-year-old Jeroo Billimoria—is a centrally-funded phone line for children in distress; they can dial 1098—dus nau aath, ten nine eight—to try and get help. Ten nine eight is available in Mumbaii, Calcutta, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Patna, Bhopal, Coimbatore. It is to be connected in Ahmedabad, Varanasi, Bhubaneshwar, Jaipur and Goa. In the existing cities it has registered, till 1999, 780 calls from children needing protection from sexual and physical abuse. In Delhi alone, from October 1998 to December 1999, it has registered 315 phone calls from children being sexually and physically abused. Other Indian metros are no different. Childline city co-ordinator Neelam Kawalramani gives a Mumbaii example. A child servant, in a doctor’s home, has welts and marks and as much as a tiny body can take. ‘They promised the child’s parents in the village that they would educate it in the city. When I asked the doctor’s wife why she had not done it, she replied, “Oh the child did not want to study”,’ says Kawalramani who shifted the child out of the doctor’s house and initiated proceedings against the couple. Has the child also been sexually abused? Is a child who has gone through this much going to just come right out and say it? And what future pattern of behaviour is being set for the doctor’s two children as they watch this?

Because international data on Child Sexual Abuse is suggesting that a large number of female criminals take to crime because they had been sexually abused in childhood. Child Sexual Abuse cuts across all cultures in the world and even reduces it to a ‘sameness’; there is thus an urgent need for the recognition of the problem so that measures are put in place to prevent little girls from being sexually abused and growing into criminals.