Because little boys who have been sexually abused also grow up to be criminals but with a twist. Three teenagers have been arrested in a Mumbaii suburb on 30 December 1999, for sodomizing two young boys, ages seven and five, before killing them. The teenagers have said they did it because they were sexually abused as children by their elders.

Because formal education or being a public figure does not have much to do with stopping Child Sexual Abuse. A well-known male lawyer in Delhi, who speaks effectively on human rights, is also well known for continuously sexually abusing his two nieces until they were old enough to put a stop to it themselves.

Because mere empowerment, too, does not seem enough to stop it. In Pharala, the Nawanshahri area of Punjab, a sarpanchni—woman sarpanch—is refusing to come to the aid of an eight-and-a-half-year-old girl who has been raped by her chacha, father’s younger brother. The sarpanchni, has in fact, aligned with the chacha’s sisters and beat up the mother for daring to lodge a complaint. She says, ‘If you don’t obey the panchayat and the village’s important men, people will start boycotting you.’ The village has declared the girl unmanageable even as she screams in pain at the Nawanshahr Civil Hospital, the child cannot urinate or defecate without severe trauma. The only support her mother has is a widowed mother who came to comfort them when she heard the child screaming in pain at the hospital. The girl’s vagina and other wounds have not healed even after forty days, the mother plans on taking the child to Ludhiana for an Aids test.

Because there are more than enough surveys today which are being collated to prove that Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) is on the rise in our country. And it is as rampant in high-class and middle-class homes as ‘lower’ ones.

What the Numbers Reveal

Numbers? What kind of statistics should anyone want as proof that the enemy is within—that the highest number of Child Sexual Abuse takes place within the four walls of a supposedly secure home? What numbers would constitute ‘more’ or ‘too much’ so that the so-called society in India finally agrees that Child Sexual Abuse is today’s crisis?

Meanwhile the perpetrator is emboldened—that father, the uncle, cousin, grandfather, male relative and friend of the parents—and he does it yet again. He has free and easy access to the child’s body in the child’s own home and he knows that even if the child hesitantly voices her—and increasingly his—trauma, the truth will be denied. ‘Hush,’ the child will be told, ‘little children should not talk like this!’ Child Sexual Abuse, thus, for the perpetrator is about malevolence, and the mastery of it.

But yes, there are numbers available today. Statistics which make for damning disclosures about what is really happening to children among Indian families, more so in upper-income Indian homes. It can no longer be our best kept, and darkest, secret.

The police agree with this. Off-the-record, that is. ‘It is an invisible crime,’ they say. ‘A denied social syndrome and we can do nothing. We can only deal with evidence.’ And so they can only move when a child is brought in, torn from stem-to-stern, a ruptured anus, a tiny vagina in shreds. By that time it is late, far too late. The child is stitched up and sent back home sixty days later. To live with blood, pain, school, homework. And the perpetrator who mocks from the sidelines as he is sprung on bail.